YouTube’s latest experiment lets you watch videos with friends in real-time via Google Meet

Not a month ago, Google announced that it would be bringing direct integration of YouTube, Spotify, ‘Kahoot!’, and more into your live Meet calls to make them more fun and interactive, and today, we get the very first show of this with YouTube’s latest experiment. By visiting youtube.com/new, Premium subscribers can enable this starting today, and it will remain enabled until September 29, 2022.

This works only on Android – not iOS or the web, so if you’d prefer to activate it on your handset, just tap your profile image at the top right of the YouTube app, go to “Your Premium Benefits”, and touch the “Try new features” section.

You may also notice while toggling the feature that the previous feature – pinch to zoom on videos – is being turned off automatically as of tomorrow. Don’t worry though, because I believe it was such a useful and essential tool that it will surely become a part of the core experience while watching videos. As with all experiments, Google does tend to implement them if they received plenty of great feedback and were received well during their run time.

To start watching YouTube videos with your friends while in a Meet call, just enable the feature, open Google Meet on your phone, invite someone, go back to the YouTube app and choose a video to play it. If you do this, you’ll be prompted to add it to a Meet live share session. Accepting the permissions will allow other call participants to see and hear it at the same time as you!