In the past few months, YouTube has announced a bunch of new features. While most of them cater to web and mobile audiences, the new features announced today will improve the TV viewing experience. So, if you prefer watching YouTube on your smart TV, you’d be happy to know that the platform is introducing a new feature that will upscale low-resolution videos to high-resolution.

YouTube labels the upscaled videos as “Super Resolution”

YouTube says that the new feature uses AI to upscale video to higher resolutions. For example, a video that is initially loaded in 480p will have 720p and 1080p versions of it. This way, you’ll have more resolutions to choose from and watch YouTube videos in higher quality. 

YouTube is labeling these as Super Resolution. For now, AI upscales videos below 1080p, with support for 4K videos coming soon. Although the tool upscales the videos, YouTube says that the original resolution and files are kept intact. Given the controversy around the upscaling of Shorts videos, YouTube is giving creators an option to opt-out of this feature.

YouTube has also bumped the thumbnail size limit to 50MB alongside video upscale feature. Previously, it used to be 2MB, which made thumbnails look dull on the TV. Moving on, you’ll also soon see “impressive previews” of a channel on the homepage when you “flip through [your] favorite YouTube channels.” Additionally, you’ll see contextual search results when you’re on a channel page. YouTube says that this will prioritize videos of the channel you’re on. 

A few new shopping features are also coming

Apart from video upscale and other features, YouTube has announced two new shopping-focused features i.e., QR codes and timed product moments. YouTube notes that scanning QR codes will land you on a product page. The Google-owned video streaming platform is also testing a feature that allows creators to feature a specific product at a specific time in their video. As of now, there’s no information on the roll out timeline of these two features.

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