Our colleagues at Smart World have noticed that some non-paying users of the YouTube mobile application can now benefit from the PiP mode of the video sharing and streaming service.
Picture-in-Picture on televisions or smartphones is a feature that allows you to detach the player from a video in a window that you can place wherever you want on the screen, superimposed on another page of the browser or operating system. This tool is very practical if you have a large screen and you want to work while following a series out of the corner of your eye, for example. While PiP on YouTube is normally reserved for subscribersit seems that Google is carrying out tests to make it available to everyone.
The Italian site (which apparently does not have a YouTube Premium subscription) discovered this “anomaly” while watching a video by the famous influencer Marques Brownlee on its Android smartphone. When he had to interrupt his viewing to complete a task on the phone’s home page, he realized that the latter was continuing to read in a floating window. A quick survey launched on social networks removes the doubt: PiP mode is unlocked for many Internet userson Android as on iPhone.
YouTube is testing PiP mode for everyone, even without a Premium subscription
That said, this free PiP does not work with all videos, far from there. For the moment, the journalist has only identified three compatible videos: that of Marques Brownlee, the handling of the Steam Deck OLED from The Verge and a video on the same subject from Linus Tech Tips. Accounts which frequently have millions of views.
This anecdote is therefore rather encouraging. Google is preparing to make a paid feature free. Except that according to Small World, there is no reason to get excited. According to them, ” Google often conducts comparison tests on its applications, and this should be just one of many. For them, YouTube is not preparing to make picture-in-picture available to everyone “.