YouTube is targeting the lounge room with its new, TV-friendly interface.

Personally I've never understood why you'd want to watch YouTube clips on your television, unless you live in a region like the US where you can access full length movies and TV shows (or you use a VPN to trick YouTube into thinking you're in the US). Obviously someone must want to watch YouTube on their TV, because a range of vendors such as LG are building YouTube playback into devices such as Blu-ray players.

That's not to say that there's nothing worth watching on YouTube, for example I love the Chad Vader series and some of the Monkey and Apple clips such as the brilliant Large Hadron Collider Budget Meeting (Language Warning: perhaps Not Safe For Work). I just don't see why you'd bother sitting down on the couch to watch short clips on your television.

Anyway, YouTube's new XL interface is a pretty good first effort, designed to work in a browser on a computer or games console. Unfortunately even if you do live in the US you can't use it to watch YouTube's library of movies or TV shows, as the licensing issues are still being worked out. The other obvious shortcoming is that there's no remote-friendly onscreen keyboard, so it's not really a true sit-back interface unless you've got a wireless keyboard or you just want to flick through the menus without searching. It also doesn't work as well with media centre remotes as other TV friendly options, such as Hulu Desktop.

There's still plenty of work to be done, but YouTube XL is an interesting idea which gives us an indication of what YouTube has in store for the future.