YouTube TV to finally add picture-in-picture on iOS

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube TV users are about to get some much-requested features baked into their streaming experience, including a wider rollout of picture-in-picture support for iOS — finally.

Speaking with The Vergecast, YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan said while he couldn’t share an exact date, picture-in-picture support on iOS should arrive “hopefully in the next few months” for YouTube TV users. The feature has been available to Android users for quite a while, but support for YouTube TV users on iOS is long overdue.

During a lightning round of feature requests during the tail end of the show, Mohan also confirmed a handful of other support news exclusively to The Verge. YouTube TV announced support for surround sound last summer, but the rollout has been fairly limited on devices and TVs. (It isn’t even supported on Google’s own Chromecast with Google TV devices yet, which is wild.) Mohan attributed the slow feature rollout to software support and software upgrades, but added that YouTube TV could widen support over the next six months.

“The rollout of that feature has certainly been a lot slower than I would’ve liked,” Mohan told The Verge’s EIC Nilay Patel. “My hope though is, hopefully over the next six months, you start to see that in a lot more devices out there as they go through their various stages of software upgrade cycles. I think that if we’re chatting in six months, that situation should be dramatically better.”

Mohan did later note that the rollout would happen “gradually,” adding, “I think it’ll happen as these various devices roll out software updates.”

Lastly, Mohan said that landscape mode should soon be getting an update that’ll make it easier to see all the stuff that normally happens below a video but is wiped from view when your mobile device is flipped sideways, e.g. while you’re on the elliptical.

“We are bringing those controls — first that tray of controls that you see below the video, share, likes, dislikes, those types of controls — as an overlay on top of the video when you’re in landscape mode, the ability to sort of navigate more seamlessly while you’re in landscape mode without having to either turn the phone or pick it up or what have you,” Mohan said. We’ve recently started to see these changes appear in the main YouTube app.

“So stay tuned for that,” he added. “That is definitely something that we want to do. A lot of our consumption on mobile devices, as you can imagine, happens in landscape.”