How to watch unlisted youtube videos on a smart TV

November 22, 2022

Many teams request that their game film be published to youtube as “unlisted”, as a precaution against opponents using that game film to scout against your own team. “Unlisted” videos on youtube are available to anyone with the link to the video, but are NOT able to be found by any type of searching, whether by youtube or any other internet search engine.

Therefore the URL (Link) for your unlisted video becomes the key to the kingdom, which is usually shared to the player and familes via email, sms text, or some other team management app, all of which are on your PHONE, and likely not on your TV. So how does one watch this on a Smart TV youtube app?

There are two options:

  1. Watch the video on your phone, and Cast from your phone to your TV. (Personally, I hate this option. Casting is glitchy and unreliable. Period. Besides you cannot use your phone while you are casting!)
  2. Watch the video in the TV’s youtube app (just makes sense right?)

The solution requires that you have a youtube account which you likely have already and don’t even know it! if you have a gmail address, your Gmail username and password work across all the products, and in this case we’ll be using them to log into youtube. If you do not have a gmail address, you may still already have a “google account” connected to some other external email. And finally if you do not have ANY google account, you would need to create one. Instructions for createing a google account for youtube can be found in this video.

The short explanation of what we are going to do it put the unlisted video into one of your own playlists with youtube, then log into the TV’s youtube all with that same username, and access playlists you saved the videos into.

The long explantion and step-by-step is:

  1. Log into youtube on your mobile device or computer (wherever you are receving the links to the unlisted video)
  2. Go back to where you received a link to an unlisted video, and click the link. That should bring you back into youtube and start playing the unlisted video
  3. With that video on the screen, find and click the “SAVE” button within the youtube player. It may require you to slide the tool panel across within youtube app to find it
  4. With the save button pressed you will, the video will be saved directly to a recent playlist, most likely “watch later”. There should be a pop-up stating which playlist it was added to and askif you wish to change it, that is up to you.
  5. Now open the youtube app on the smart TV, and log into that youtube app using the same google account used in the previous steps.
  6. Once you are logged in you can navigate to your “library” where you should see your playlists. Selected the playlist your put the unlisted video into and you are all done!

Please note you would likely need to do this for each unlisted video you get.

It may sound/look complicated, but once you do it once you will quickly get a feel for it!