How YouTube built a better way to connect your TV and phone

TV remotes suck, and YouTube is tired of dealing with them. “It’s very hard to type on TV with a remote,” says Brynn Evans, the head of design for YouTube on TV. “Like, the remote’s clunky, every remote’s different, there’s a million different buttons. They’re all bad.” Every app and service has tried to find ways around this, from those “activate on the web” screens that save you from typing your password to a heavy emphasis on voice search. Your Apple TV will practically beg you to type on your phone rather than with your remote. But even that’s not enough for YouTube.

So YouTube’s rolling out a new feature that more closely connects your phone to your TV. (It works on Android and iOS devices, so tablets should work too.) If you sit...

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