YouTube TV may soon let you keep listening even when you can’t watch

You may soon be able to keep listening to your TV shows on YouTube TV even if you can’t watch them. Google appears to be finally bringing background playback to its YouTube TV streaming service. The company confirmed to The Verge that it’s “experimenting” with enabling YouTube TV playback after a phone is locked.

As reported by 9to5Google, the feature was spotted a couple of weeks ago by Reddit users who found they could continue listening to YouTube TV audio even after sending the video app to the background on their mobile devices.

Background playback lets you keep listening to your content when your phone’s screen is off or locked. So, you can still listen to the audio even if you can’t watch the action. This could be helpful in lots of situations, including if you’re following a live sporting event and have to go pick up your kid from school but want to keep hearing the play-by-play while driving safely.

The premium subscription for Google’s YouTube service has the option of background playback, and that subscription also removes ads from your videos. But it’s not been possible on Google’s live TV service, which starts at $72.99 a month and includes ads. Instead, when you switch away from the YouTube TV app, the show pauses and the audio stops.

Allison Toh, product communications manager at YouTube, confirmed in an email to The Verge that the company is indeed working on bringing it to YouTube TV:

I can confirm that we are running an experiment that enables YouTube TV playback to continue after the phone screen is locked for Android and iOS mobile users.

If a viewer has the YouTube TV app on and then goes to lock their phone, playback will continue. If users want to avoid background playback, they can pause the video before locking their phone.

However, it’s not an official feature yet, and Toh didn’t respond to a question asking if there were plans to roll it out more broadly. She did say that the experiment is currently available to a select group of users across Android and iOS mobile devices.