If you’re a mobile multi-tasker, you probably want features in your phone and in your apps that will let you do several things at once. Watching YouTube videos is probably one of those apps that you can use in the background while browsing through your social media feed or something. Unfortunately, only Premium subscribers were able to so that. Now, YouTube is bringing this picture-in-picture mode to non-paying users, previously available in the US only but now in other territories as well.
If you’re not familiar with what PiP does, it lets you keep YouTube playing while you do other things on your phone. You can resize it so you can multi-task, move it around on other parts of your screen or open an app side-by-side with it. Basically, the idea is to keep watching whatever it is you’re watching on YouTube and still be able to use your phone for other things.
Back in 2016, YouTube finally added multi-window support but if you wanted other things like picture-in-picture and background playback (letting the audio play even while you switched to other apps), you had to be a subscriber. At that time it was YouTube Red but now it has been simplified to YouTube Premium.
Then in the middle of last year, some regular YouTube users started noticing that they had picture-in-picture support even if they were not paying subscribers. At that time though it was only limited to the US. And of course, you still had ads playing in the middle of videos or in between videos, since ad-free videos are only for those who subscribe to Premium of course.
Now it looks like they’re rolling it out to other countries as well, although for now, it seems to be initially in Italy only. But that means other countries will be coming too. You can check if it’s in your country already by playing a video then exiting the app or switching to another one and then see what happens, if it stops or if it goes in PiP mode.
VIA: Android Police
