YouTube TV arrived in 2017 as a new extension of the service, now dedicated to the live TV and on-demand content segment.

Since its launch, YouTube TV has become one of the most popular services. Its extensive catalog of channels and a competitive price managed to attract millions of users.

The Live Guide is the section through which YouTube TV users can access all channels. So, ideally, the Live Guide UI should have an intuitive design.

However, it seems that the YouTube TV service has been undergoing changes in both the UI and UX. But many users are not quite liking the tweaks.

The latest YouTube TV ‘Live Guide’ UI and UX changes that are bothering many

According to multiple reports, the UI and UX changes in the new YouTube TV Live Guide make the experience worse.

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Apparently, the YouTube TV team was looking for a more graphical and minimalist experience, with less text. And they made changes with this in mind.

For instance, making the Live Guide thumbnails larger, reducing the amount of visible metadata, and even making the font smaller.

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The larger size of Live Guide thumbnails results in less visible content fitting into the UI. As a result, the experience becomes less intuitive by requiring more movements to explore the entire catalog.

Also, many metadata elements that were previously visible are now hidden. If the user wants to see the metadata of the channels or shows, they will have to access additional options in the Live Guide UI.

I agree. They don’t seem to actually HAVE a preference engine. I DO like that I can organize the channels in the guide to my own liking. Program Metadata is either non-existatnt or not accessible. You can’t easily look ahead on the EPG but you can search, which helps, but yeah.
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Also, the reduction in font size complicates visibility.

Oh yeah, well WHO CAN READ IT? The guide print is TOO SMALL!! Fix that YTTV!
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It seems that there are also functional changes in the behavior of certain YouTube TV features. For instance, the ’10 second rewind’ now requires 3 clicks, which is more complicated than before.

3 clicks to go back 10 sec. It’s like the engineers have never used another service. I’m in the trial phase and feel your pain. Hopper had me spoiled
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YouTube TV team looking into the ‘Live Guide’ UI and UX issues

Having said all the above, it seems that YouTube TV’s value for money is helping keep users even if they are unhappy with the UI and UX changes.

This is true for me…until I start adding boxes to cover all my TVs. If I only had 1, maybe 2 TVs in my house then I’d honestly probably switch back. But once you start adding on multiple additional boxes, DVR fees, etc. YTTV still wins on price, for me.

I agree with many of your points about the UI – hopefully they continue to improve going forward.
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However, ideally, both the overall experience and the quality of the content should go hand in hand. And it seems that the YouTube TV team agrees with this, as they are looking into the Live Guide UI issues.

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We will update this story if new related events arise in the future.

NOTE: You can also check the YouTube bugs/issues tracker.

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.

Jean Leon
1613 Posts

A tech enthusiast since ever. I like to always be up to date on the latest news in the industry and write about it. Twitter: @jean_ERdC

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