There’s a nifty workaround that you can take advantage in order to watch your YouTube videos in Picture in Picture Mode, and it’s mostly thanks to a simple new web app that you can access in Safari.
It’s called YouTube PIP and it basically does all the messy work in order to get true Picture in Picture Mode for YouTube videos.
All you have to do is open up a video in the YouTube app. From there, tap the Share button (a curved arrow pointing to the right) and then select Copy Link.
Next, go into Safari and visit the YouTube PIP webpage linked above in your Safari browser. Paste the link that you just copied into the text box and then hit Go.
The video will appear in the center of the screen and you can begin playing it. At that point, a Picture in Picture icon will appear that you can tap on to bring the video into Picture in Picture Mode. From there, you can go into any app you want and use it completely while having the YouTube video play in the corner, complete with audio.
The developer of the web app that makes this happen explains that when you paste in a YouTube link, his web app embeds the video using HTML5. The nice thing about HTML5 video in iOS 9 is that Picture in Picture Mode is available automatically, so you can just enable the feature for that embedded video without much hassle at all.
YouTube just recently updated its iPad app with a new design, but has yet to include Picture in Picture Mode as a feature within the app, probably because it would affect the video site’s advertising model, but who know. Hopefully Google implements the feature soon, as it would be a big feature for iPad users.
Of course, though, Picture in Picture Mode has yet to spread to many more popular video apps like Netflix, and there are still only a handful of streaming apps that support Picture in Picture Mode. However, that should change over the next few months as developers update their apps and include more iOS 9 features.
At this point, though, users will have to use this workaround in order to watch YouTube videos in Picture in Picture Mode on the iPad.
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