YouTube is testing a new mobile app feature that will allow premium subscribers to zoom in on any video. The feature, which is currently among the experimental features, offers the possibility of zooming for videos; works in full screen landscape view.
According to the company, the zoom feature will remain in testing until September 1, during which time user feedback will be collected.
Open YouTube’s settings menu from your phone or website to enable the Pinch-to-zoom feature. As long as you subscribe to YouTube Premium, you will see the “try new features” section. The only feature currently available for testing is the zoom function. You can start trying the feature with the Join button.
However, the feature may not be activated as soon as you press the join button. We haven’t been able to get the feature working yet in our trials. So it looks like there might be a delay between joining the test and actually being able to use the pinch gesture. However, once activated, you will be able to zoom videos up to 8x.
There are already ways to zoom in on YouTube’s content with various accessibility functions on Android and iOS, and it’s easy to do in a desktop browser. However, using it as an optional native feature in the mobile app seems to be much more convenient.