When not busy pondering whether politicians should be subject to the same rules as regular users, Twitter is actively developing new features and improvements for its platform. Just recently, the social media company has announced that it is currently testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly in your timeline.
But before you celebrate, it is worth noting that the feature is only being tested on the platform’s iOS app. Furthermore, much like the previously announced ability to share full-sized images, the new feature is only rolled out to a small group of users and is not made available to the public at this time.
This new ability to embed or watch YouTube videos on Twitter is a quality-of-life feature that has been a long time coming. Currently, videos that are shared on the platform will appear as thumbnails that links you to YouTube instead – an approach that is still maintained on rival social media platform Facebook.
Starting today on iOS, we’re testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly in your Home timeline, without leaving the conversation on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/V4qzMJMEBs
— Support (@Support) March 18, 2021
As seen from the example shown above, tweets featuring these videos will come with a YouTube logo situated beneath the embedded player. Like the regular videos that are uploaded to Twitter, it appears that YouTube videos can also be set to be played either automatically or manually by the user.
Twitter has yet to reveal when it is planning to fully roll out this new feature to all of its users. Similarly, it is not known if the test will be expanded to Android users as well in the near future.
(Source: Twitter [1])
