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 YouTube TV is getting an update to its interface. These new changes will specifically include updates to the library and guide, Mohan said.
“I hope you’ve noticed that the way the UX and the interface continues to improve on a regular basis, as opposed to kind of like a big bang,” Mohan told The Vergecast. “And so, what we have store in 2022 are some of those critical, again, sort of those critical user journeys. So there’s obviously kind of two of the … Two of the places are the library and live, where we all, as consumers of the product, spend a lot of time.”
