Posted in: Desktop software

YouTube Leanback makes for lazy watching of lolcat videos

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Google is laboring away to keep us lazy – cool, right? The appropriately named YouTube Leanback is something like Google Reader Play, but for YouTube videos.

YouTube Leanback is the successor of YouTube XL and lets you kick back, relax and view videos from your subscriptions and videos your friends have shared on Facebook…

The interface is pretty simple – there almost isn’t one. Playback starts immediately, in full screen and in high definition. And when one video ends, Leanback automatically switches to the next video and so on until you stop it.

Using the arrow keys, you can control the playback – skipping a video is just a press of the right arrow key away. The up and down keys can be used to search, browse channels and videos and access the player controls. Watch the official demo video for more details.

Or you could just trust YouTube Leanback – based on your settings, it will pull videos from channels you’ve subscribed to and it will let you watch videos you’ve rented as well as videos from your friends on Facebook (if you’ve linked your accounts, which takes about a second to do).

The videos can be watched on any monitor connected to your computer, including TVs (it’s quite possible that the YouTube Leanback and Google TV projects are connected). The service is still in beta (it’s from Google after all) and you can access it at www.youtube.com/leanback.

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