Summary
- YouTube Premium is a paid subscription service that offers ad-free videos, background play, offline downloads, and integrated music streaming.
- YouTube is expanding the Premium feature set to more gadget form factors and devices.
- This rollout brings more flexible, cross-device content consumption to the Premium experience, with much-needed feature parity across competing operating systems.
Within the world of multimedia streaming, Google’s paid YouTube Premium service stands as a solid offering with tons of features, flexible content consumption options, and a massive library of both video and audio to sink your teeth into. Perks include ad-free videos, the ability to play content in the background or with your device’s screen off, the option to download content for offline consumption, and full-blown music streaming integration.
Most recently, in a new announcement post, YouTube confirmed plans to roll out a grab bag of existing Premium features to a broader range of gadget form factors and operating systems, further unifying the subscription-basedplatform’s end-user experience. Here are three upcoming cross-device YouTube Premium membership perks that, with their newfound discoverability, have me genuinely considering smashing that subscribe button once and for all.
YouTube Shorts on iPhone are no longer short-changed
Finally, short-form feature parity across both major mobile operating systems
YouTube Shorts is Google’s answer to the uber-popular trend of vertically oriented short-form video consumption. Conceptually similar to TikTok and Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts offers a never-ending feed of snappy videos from content creators and influencers, which are highly bingeable in nature. Unlike traditional video posts, Shorts can be quickly parsed through using an intuitive swiping motion with your finger.
For some time now, Shorts have been available across YouTube’s mobile apps for iPhone and Android, in addition to the web. However, up until this point, only Android users have been enjoying such perks as the ability to watch Shorts on mobile via a Picture-in-Picture (PiP) floating window mode, as well as the Shorts Smart Downloads feature that automatically downloads a curated selection of Shorts to your phone for offline consumption.
Thankfully, this status quo is finally being upended: while Shorts Picture-in-Picture and Smart Downloads have both been available on iOS in an opt-in experimental capacity, they’re officially rolling out into the mainstream for all iPhone users to benefit from going forward.
Higher-fidelity audio meets YouTube Music
Google is stepping up its high-res audio streaming game
Included within the standard YouTube Premium subscription tier (but absent from the Premium Light tier) is access to YouTube Music — Google’s first-party Spotify and Apple Music rival. This dedicated acoustic experience offers many of the same perks found on competing music streamers, including background play, offline downloads, new track discoverability, and playlist creation tools.
When it comes to music consumption, the availability of high-quality audio is an important aspect of the experience. Streaming audio tracks from the internet tends to introduce a certain level of compression into the mix, and so the likes of lossless audio in Apple Music and Lossless Listening for Spotify Premium help circumvent some of this quality loss.
According to Google, YouTube Music’s enhanced audio feature is only available “for official/premium music videos and Art Tracks (auto-generated YouTube versions of music tracks and albums).
YouTube Music’s enhanced audio feature serves a similar function, though, until now, it has only been available within the YouTube Music app and through the main YouTube app via an opt-in experimental mode. As of now, this discrepancy has been rectified, and both iOS and Android users can enjoy “a richer listening experience with enhanced audio” from within YouTube proper.
Powerful new video playback controls are on deck
Granular playback speeds and the jump ahead function are expanding in availability
Previously only available in mobile app form for Android and iOS, the ability to fine-tune playback speeds by increments of 0.05 (up to 4x playback speed) is finally rolling out onto YouTube’s desktop web client. For reference, until now, YouTube Premium subscribers were capped at a maximum 2x speed increase when visiting the site from a desktop-class web browser, which is the same cap currently in place for non-paying YouTube users.
Additionally, Premium’s useful AI jump ahead feature, which lets you skip to parts of a given video that have been deemed to be interesting or ‘key,’ is now rolling out across the YouTube app on Smart TVs and game consoles. As a tool, jump ahead comes in handy on iOS, Android, and the web, and so porting it over to the biggest screen in your house is an appreciated move.
