YouTube recently brought out a new update to its Apple TV app which replaces the pause screen with terrible photos, requiring some extra button presses to get back to the video you were watching.
Imagine the scene — you’re on a lunch break, and you decide to watch a Shark Tank or Masterchef clip on YouTube. You need to take the dog out, so you pause it. Normally, you’d expect to go back and press Play on the Siri Remote. Instead, you’re now greeted with a landscape of badly compressed images — your impressive TV is suddenly wasted on those low-quality pictures. Sounds annoying doesn’t it?
Furthermore, the Back button has to be pressed on the Remote twice to make the current video appear again — which makes this feature even more annoying. It doesn’t stop there though. You can’t change when these images will appear — so you’re trapped with a four-minute time limit before the screensaver kicks in.
Worse still, this update also overrides the high-quality Apple TV screensavers if you stay in the YouTube app, even if you’re not playing a video. It’s a bizarre addition that doesn’t help the user experience at all. Fortunately, there’s a temporary fix to make sure you’re not greeted with pixelated landscapes — but we’re hoping that YouTube brings out another update soon that disables this fully.
How to get rid of pixelated landscapes and bring back the pause screen
Although there are no settings in the YouTube app to get rid of this new feature, there is another way and it works on all the best Apple TVs.
- Open Settings on the Apple TV home screen
- Select General, then Screensaver
- Choose Start After, then 2 minutes
This way, Apple’s stunning screensavers appear before YouTube’s terrible alternative when you pause a video. It’s a relief, but it’d be great to see a further update from Google’s video app to disable its screensaver feature completely.
For now, it’s a bad user experience, and we hope YouTube reverses course on this pixelated screensaver feature soon.
