Shortly after Twitter announced it would begin testing a better way to display images on its app, it’s now doing the same for YouTube videos. According to a new post on Twitter’s Support account, the company will today start testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly from your home timeline within the Twitter iOS app. That means you’ll be able to click and play a video without having to leave the conversation you’re currently viewing.
Before this change, YouTube videos wouldn’t show a preview on iOS, so you’d have to click the link to start watching. This would take you out of the conversation to another screen where you could play the video or tap again to open the YouTube iOS app, if you preferred.
Now, you’ll be able to scroll and watch videos without losing your place on the Twitter timeline.
Twitter says it’s initially testing the feature on iOS in the U.S., Japan, Canada and Saudi Arabia, before rolling it out globally. It didn’t offer a time frame for when this would be available to all Twitter users.
The company had announced earlier this month it would be working towards a better media-viewing experience on its app, including for both sharing and viewing media, like photos and videos. With the photo preview test launched to iOS and Android last week, Twitter is now giving users a more accurate preview of what images look like, for example. Before, it would crop images automatically — often hiding key portions of a photo.
Twitter also recently announced the ability for users to upload 4K images on both Android and iOS, accessible through a new feature in your “Data Usage” settings in the Twitter app.
These changes are not only welcome from a user annoyance perspective, they’re also tied into Twitter’s newly announced ambitions to become a platform that serves creators. The company said it’s soon introducing a new subscription-based service called “Super Follow” that will allow creators to publish subscriber-only content on Twitter, like newsletters, deals, and other exclusive content, which likely includes exclusive media. But in order to support creators, who often have their content spread across social platforms around the web, Twitter has to make the process of sharing that content — whether photos, videos or anything else — feel seamless and native to the app.
Twitter will likely have a few more updates on this front in the days and weeks to come.
