News

YouTube TV rolls out picture-in-picture support for iPhones, finally

This is long overdue.

by
Kevin Raposo
March 31, 2022

Image: KnowTechie

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YouTube delivered on its promise. The company announced that it’s now rolling out picture-in-picture mode for YouTube TV on iOS. YouTube originally hinted in February that it had plans to introduce this feature to iPhone users on the Vergecast podcast.

Picture-in-picture is a really neat feature that allows you to watch YouTube TV videos while using other apps on your smartphone.

In other words, it essentially shrinks the video into a small player that you can easily move around your home screen and position over other apps.

To paint a better picture, this video shows what PIP looks like in practice:

To turn it on, YouTube says to select a video to watch and swipe up from the bottom of the screen to return to the device’s homepage. The video can scale down and move across your screen.

But, what about YouTube? Does the company have any plans to extend this feature to its main app, specifically for users without a YouTube Premium subscription?

In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Allison Toh said that the company is “still testing picture-in-picture on iOS with Premium members and hope to make it available to all iOS users (Premium and non-Premium) in the US in the coming months.”

Either way, we’ll take what we can get with YouTube TV. Picture-in-picture is a god-send of a feature, and having YouTube TV roll this out to the iPhone is going to guarantee my ongoing subscription with them.

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