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. [Photo: SAM-RIZ44/Pixabay]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)
