Twitter is testing letting you watch YouTube videos right from a tweet

Twitter is testing a way to let you watch YouTube videos right from your timeline. Typically, when someone includes a YouTube link in a tweet, clicking that link sends you to YouTube, which can be frustrating if you didn’t want to leave Twitter to watch the video. This new feature, which is in testing today on iOS, means you won’t be sent away from Twitter, which will make it easier to watch a video and then keep on scrolling if you so choose.

The test will be available to “a very small group of users” in Canada, the US, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, Twitter said in a statement shared with The Verge after we first published this story.

“The current test on iOS will be a four-week experiment,” a Twitter spokesperson said. We plan to take a look at the results and will scale accordingly.”

This new test arrives alongside two others announced last week for iOS and Android that are intended to improve sharing and viewing media on the social network. One test adds a “what you see is what you get” image preview in the tweet composer, meaning images appear in your timeline as they do when you’re drafting a tweet. The company is also testing ways to upload and view 4K images on mobile.

:story: The Verge