YouTube’s TV app just got a great free upgrade

It's that time again – Google has issued its quarterly update for the YouTube TV app on Smart TVs and games consoles.

The goal, as ever, is to make it much easier to find and watch interesting things, and this time around there are some fun musical features too.

First of all, there are new Shelves. The Continue Your Search shelf shows your top three searches, enabling you to quickly search again for your favourite topics or creators.

The Primetime Channels shelf shows subscribers highlights from the most recently searched for and watched Primetime channels. And the From Your Top Channels shelf shows the YouTube channels you watch the most.

YouTube's TV app gets more musical

As a big music fan, I like the look of the Listen again and Live Performances, Remixes and Covers shelves. The former is a dedicated shelf for the songs you've recently searched for and listened to, while the latter promises to show you other versions of your favourite songs rather than just the best-known version.

That could be fun if, like me, many of your favourite artists like to reimagine and reinterpret their songs when they're on stage.

There's a new Podcasts tab to make it easier to tune into the podcasts from your library, and Shorts has now been split from long-form videos to make it easier to find stuff in YouTube Shorts.

The app's looping feature has been improved too. Previously you could only loop playlists, but Google says you can now loop all video on demand: you can set that in the Playback Settings menu.

Finally for viewers, there's more use of inline previews – now in the channel pages, subscription pages and topics pages – and the rollout of Immersive Channel Previews has been completed. These are full-screen background previews on channel headers.