One of the most underrated features of Apple TV is its gorgeous screensavers that show aerial views of breathtaking locations in vivid 4K. In a mildly alarming development, it’s been reported that the YouTube app for Apple TV has recently been set up to override the system screensaver and run its own lower-quality equivalent.
By default, the Apple TV begins showing a screensaver after it’s been left idle for five minutes. But if you’ve got the YouTube app open, this will instead trigger its own screensaver just before that point, according to the visual effects artist and podcaster Joe Rosensteel. This appears to be a recent development, given that an earlier version of the app that Rosensteel checked on a different Apple TV did not display the same behavior.
It’s not clear how this started happening or why the tvOS system allows it, but we assume Apple is investigating a way to block it in tvOS 17.5.
At the moment this is merely annoying. The Apple TV’s screensaver is, as you would probably expect from an Apple creation, visually sumptuous and well-designed. But the YouTube screensaver is simply a mishmash of low-quality still images from various videos. Or, worse still, if you’ve got one specific video open and paused, the app will loop the thumbnail art for that video. As Rosensteel quite reasonably observes, “Some of the worst sins of mankind exist in YouTube thumbnails, and they’re not designed to be screensavers.” Aside from the poor quality of the artwork, many of the images he saw being used featured static text and logos, which isn’t ideal for a screensaver.
But this may point to more pernicious behavior in the future because YouTube is unlikely to be interested in running its own screensaver for the fun of it. At some point, Rosensteel predicts, the company will try to leverage this real estate to run adverts or promote selected content. And other apps could attempt to horn in on the racket too.
Right now, there’s a fairly easy solution to stop this happening. While the Apple TV’s screensaver kicks off after five minutes by default, this can easily be set to a lower value. Change this to three minutes and it will pre-empt YouTube and prevent its screensaver from ever being seen. If the YouTube app ever gets clever enough to detect the system settings and undercut them by two seconds, we’ll all be in trouble–but maybe Apple will step in and have a word.