YouTube is testing a new ‘pinch to zoom’ feature on mobile with its Premium subscribers, according to a new report. The feature works in both portrait and in landscape view.
Paying users will soon be able to use ‘Pinch to zoom’ on YouTube videos
According to YouTube, the ‘Pinch to zoom’ feature will remain in testing until September 1, giving the company ample time to gauge how its working and how its users are responding to it before a wider rollout is initiated.
To enable the functionality, users can open YouTube’s settings menu either on their smartphone or from the website. As long as they are Premium subscribers, the feature should be available under the “try new features” section.
Today, YouTube added its new pinch to zoom feature to the experimental features page. This is a little different than the feature long available to everyone that allows you to fill your screen in landscape mode. Rather than filling your screen, pinch to zoom allows you to use two fingers to zoom into the video player. Once zoomed in, you can move around and look at parts of the video closer. This feature looks to be made specifically for portrait mode viewing.
Although you can already zoom into a video on a desktop, the functionality being added to the app natively is pretty helpful. However, as of right now, we do not know when the feature will be rolled out to all premium subscribers, globally.
In related news, YouTube has been rolling out picture-in-picture to all users in the U.S. and premium subscribers globally over the last several weeks. Picture-in-Picture allows users to watch videos from their favorite creators while scrolling through social media apps, texting, browsing the web, etc. The video will continue to play in a small thumbnail window, allowing two apps to multitask on your device.
(via 9to5Google)
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