YouTube Tests Video Zoom In For Premium Users

In addition to an ad-free watching experience, YouTube Premium users also get some additional advantages over free users. Some of these, like background play for mobile, feel like pretty basic features that are locked away behind a paywall nevertheless. It looks like the video streaming platform is testing another feature for premium subscribers, which is pinch-to-zoom.

To be clear, this new experimental feature is not to be confused with the one that lets you fill up the screen on phones with wider than 16:9 displays. That one has been around for the longest time, is available to everyone, and only works in landscape view. This new pinch-to-zoom, on the other hand, works for both portrait and landscape mode, and allows you to focus on specific parts of a video as if you were zooming in on an image.

As the feature is still in its experimental stages, YouTube Premium users will have to opt-in to testing it. To do so, head to the settings menu, where a “try new features” section will appear for Premium subscribers. Though for now, this pinch-to-zoom is the only new feature being tested. As The Verge reports, there’s also a slight delay between opting in and actually being able to test the new feature. But once it’s active, you can zoom in up to 8x.

All that being said though, a pinch-to-zoom feature for videos sounds like a one that’s only useful in very specific scenarios. No doubt there are some content creators that can go wild with this, by overanalysing a trailer frame-by-frame, for example.

But for the average user, it’s difficult to imagine that this will be something that will be utilised for a majority of videos. Due to this, depending on your perspective, it will either make complete sense, or none at all, for YouTube to lock this behind a Premium subscription.

(Source: The Verge)

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