YouTube Celebrates its 20th Anniversary With New Features

YouTube is turning 20 years old this year, and Google is celebrating with new key metrics and details about upcoming features. Since the publication of the first-ever video on the platform, YouTube has become a true cultural phenomenon welcoming over 20 trillion videos over the past 20 years.

The YouTube you use today is quite different from how the platform looked just a couple of years ago: The free version is now filled with ads, and YouTube is still aggressively pushing the “Shorts” vertical video format popularized by Instagram and TikTok.

Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, boldly said in February that YouTube was “the new television,” with TV now being the primary device for YouTube viewing in the US. YouTube also became the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S, and over 20 million new videos are being uploaded to the platform every day.

In the coming weeks, Google plans to improve the YouTube TV experience with a new multiview feature for select non-sports content. The experimental feature will only support “a small group of popular channels” at launch, and a bigger TV viewing upgrade is also coming later this summer. “Easier navigation, playback, quality tweaks, plus streamlined access to comments, channel info, and subscribing are heading to your screens,” Google said today.

The regular YouTube platform is also getting new features, including a 4x playback speed option that’s now rolling out to YouTube Premium subscribers. In YouTube Music, a new Ask Music feature lets users create a personalized radio station by just describing the type of music they’d like to listen to. This experience is currently only available for English-language subscribers in select countries.

Lastly, the YouTube team is also experimenting with a new feature that enables creators to reply to comments with their voice. These voice replies will become available for more YouTube creators later this year.