YouTube

YouTube rolls out experimental ‘pinch to zoom’ feature for Premium users

Andrew Romero | Aug 4 2022 - 10:42 am PT

YouTube has a program that allows Premium subscribers to access brand new features that aren’t quite fully baked. Today, YouTube dropped a new one called “pinch to zoom” for viewers that allows you to zoom into a video on-screen, even in landscape mode.

YouTube Premium subscribers get a lot of little extra features like background play and downloaded videos built into the YouTube experience. With the ability to try different new experimental features, Premium users can discover new tools before anyone else.

Prior experimental features have since made their way into the full YouTube experience. Being able to voice search in a browser found its way to YouTube through the experiments page. Another experiment brought to Premium users was easier playlist management, allowing users to easily drag and reorder upcoming videos around.

Today, YouTube added its new pinch to zoom feature to the experimental features page. This is a little different than the feature long available to everyone that allows you to fill your screen in landscape mode. Rather than filling your screen, pinch to zoom allows you to use two fingers to zoom into the video player. Once zoomed in, you can move around and look at parts of the video closer. This feature looks to be made specifically for portrait mode viewing.

If you’re a Premium member, you can find the new feature in the YouTube app on Android; just tap your profile photo and then hit Your Premium benefits. From there, you can find the Try new features page and turn on YouTube’s pinch to zoom. It may take a while to kick in until you can give this new tool a shot.

Pinch to zoom will only be available until September 1, giving YouTube Premium users enough time to try the new feature out and leave feedback. We’ll likely see this feature in full down the road, though we’re not sure exactly when and if the tool will come to unpaid members.