Google is taking this week to introduce a couple of handy new features to its widely popular email service — Gmail. Post the addition of the ability to send and receive money using Gmail on Android, the email service is now making it particularly easier for users to stream video attachments on the web. This is a minor but significant update on this front.
If you regularly exchange video attachments with your friends on Gmail, then you know what a chore it currently is to be able to watch the same on the desktop. You’d have to download the video on your computer and then watch it on your local media player. But, Gmail aims to fix that by now allowing you to stream them right within its email service.
With this minor upgrade, you will no longer be directly prompted to download the video attachment locally. You will now be shown a thumbnail, which upon clicking will open a YouTube-style native video player within Gmail. Now, hitting the play button on this video attachment will start streaming, thus, eliminating the immediate need to download the same for viewing it.
This video player pops up like an overlay over your emails and even allows you to adjust quality and sound levels for the attachment. It is streamed at optimal quality and availability by default. In addition, the official blog post adds that the said feature is powered by the same Google infrastructure that runs its prominent services — YouTube, Google Drive, and other video streaming apps.
Google is rolling out the said video streaming feature update to all Gmail users, but it will be gradual and might take up to 15 days. This means not only your daily video consumption becomes a tad bit easy, but the same applies for G Suite enterprise professionals as well. Gmail attachments are, however, only limited to 25MB, which means you will have to choose between sending long or high-resolution videos.
