This week, YouTube debuted a new look for its videos, playlists, and user channels called—not-so-obviously—”Cosmic Panda ^[1].” The new design features widescreen and HD poster frames and less white area around the video to create a greater cinematic experience.

Besides the visual alterations, one of the biggest changes in Cosmic Panda is the new emphasis on serialized content to give content creators more views and more subscribers. In Cosmic Panda, when a user clicks on a video, each video page highlights other specific videos from the original channel, rather than advertise random “related” videos that are only actually related some of the time.

Douglas Sarine, the iconic Ninja from the long-running YouTube series Ask a Ninja ^[2], had a chance to play around with the intergalactic ursine interface.

“Advertisements definitely seem to be given more premium placement in, what I will call, the clearly-defined video player band,” Sarine says. “Hopefully this will ultimately increase value for advertisers and CPMs for content creators who use YouTube as their main distribution channel.”

While Cosmic Panda is still under heavy development, the experiment is currently open to the public so YouTube’s engineers can build off the feedback from its active users and partners. So go give it a try ^[1], and tell us what you think!

Read more from GigaOM ^[3].