YouTube apparently rolls back feature that irked Apple TV users

Phil Nickinson
·2 min read
A video preview (or screensaver, if you will) for abstract pouring techniques on YouTube, as seen on an Apple TV.
A video preview (or screensaver, if you will) for abstract pouring techniques on YouTube, as seen on an Apple TV. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

Our long national nightmare is over. As spotted by the folks who blew the whistle in the first place (and picked up by 9to5Mac), you can now use the YouTube app on Apple TV without fear that YouTube itself will show a screensaver-like video as a preview of other videos when you’re not actually watching a video in the first place because you left the app idle.

Or in other words, folks will have to stop complaining that the YouTube app “stole” their screensaver away from Apple, even though it didn’t. Not really, anyway.

What happened was that at some point in April 2024, the YouTube app on Apple TV started showing what looked like screensavers if you left the YouTube app idle for around 4 minutes and change. And those screensavers had a little “Press up to play” icon that, when pressed up, would open the full video of the screensaver. So, really it was YouTube repurposing other videos as screensavers.

There were a few problems with that, though. Chief among them (to me, anyway) was that you didn’t have any control over it. There were no settings, and no mechanism by which to say “Don’t do that,” or “It’s fine, but wait longer before triggering.” It would hardly be the first time Google aimed after firing, though.

A preview for the "Alpen Relax" video on YouTube, as seen on Apple TV 4K.
A preview for the “Alpen Relax” video on YouTube, as seen on Apple TV 4K. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

Also problematic was that from a visual standpoint, the YouTube screensavers just weren’t anywhere near as captivating as Apple’s own Aerial screensavers. Not by a long shot. Apple’s screensavers are still the best.

And then there are the Apple fans who scoffed at the mere idea that Google would dare sully their experience somehow. I’m not among them, though I do think Google could have done this a little better. Nor do I think the YouTube app was hijacking the screensaver experience — it was just, well, bypassing it a little. You could set Apple’s screensaver to kick in quicker, and that would keep the YouTube app from launching its own screensaver-like experience that, due to the way things work, would tell the Apple TV interface “I’m still showing a video, so don’t run your own screensaver!”

None of this was a huge deal, though. Folks were complaining about an app showing something when you basically stopped paying attention to the app in the first place. Coders can be clever sometimes, and this was one of those times.

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