YouTube TV bringing picture-in-picture to its iOS app, wider surround sound support coming too

Ben Schoon | Feb 10 2022 - 6:28 am PT

Google’s YouTube TV service, despite its high price, is one of the best ways to keep live channels without traditional cable. Now, in an interview, a YouTube TV exec has confirmed that picture-in-picture support is coming to iOS and surround sound will see expanded support too.

Speaking to The Verge, YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan confirmed a few features coming to YouTube TV in the “coming months.”

First and foremost, that includes the arrival of picture-in-picture support for the iOS version of YouTube TV. Google has supported that feature on Android for a long time, but it was absent from iOS. A specific timeline for this feature is unknown, but Mohan said that it will “hopefully” arrive in “the next few months.” Notably, picture-in-picture just came to the regular YouTube app last year.

Meanwhile, YouTube TV is also working on expanding some other features. That includes surround sound, which launched last year on a very limited subset of devices. Mohan said the rollout of surround sound has been “a lot slower than [he] would’ve liked,” but that the “situation should be dramatically better” in six months or so. As it stands today, some devices that do support 5.1 surround sound on YouTube TV include Vizio, Samsung, and LG TVs, as well as Google’s original Chromecast — not the newer one based on Google TV.

Lastly, Mohan confirmed a new feature in the pipeline for YouTube TV’s mobile app, which will make additional data visible in landscape mode. As it stands today, some content on YouTube TV will show additional related information and, of course, controls when viewing in portrait mode, but rotating the device removes all of that from view.