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Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. I can load YouTube.com in my mobile browser, go full screen, and then enter my home screen and I get picture in picture just fine. It works whether I'm Premium or not. I don't need a mobile app for it. What has YouTube broken here?

I will say that I cannot use picture in picture while browsing another site in Chrome. That sucks, but I don't think that is YouTube's choice, that's just how the browser works (sadly)

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The YouTube app on Android only supports picture in picture and background play (screen off) with premium; I imagine the iOS app is similar.

Picture-in-picture works great on Android without premium.

No background play though.

Hmm, this doesn't work for me in the app in Android 10 or 11. Perhaps it is region specific? I'm in the UK.

Edit: it does work via browser if you navigate out of fullscreen. TIL :)

Happy to help! May our paths cross again.

It's US only.

This only works in the US and on Android AFAIK. If I want PiP I gotta pay or fiddle with putting the YouTube app in a Window.

AirPlay kinda-sorta works from the YouTube player but it is glitchy as hell. It works way better from normal HTML5 videos.

Yeah that's on YouTube. I get why it's hard for them, as unlike in Casting, you can only deploy media types that can be natively played back in order to support Airplay, because you are passing a media reference, not a web page. But HLS is ubiquitous and Airplay supports it, so just serve the HLS and be done with it. I've been very happy with how easy it is to support this as someone who has built a number of web media apps.

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