YouTube Premium offers many more perks that I didn’t know I was paying for

I’ve been subscribed to YouTube Premium for many years now, and yet I didn’t know what I was exactly paying for. In my mind, I always associated Premium with an ad-free experience; being able to get rid of all those pesky long and interrupting ads before or while watching a video is alone worth the price. Adding the family benefits for my husband, and the fact that this works everywhere, including on our TVs, makes it more of a no-brainer.

What I didn’t know, though, was that Premium packs some smaller but very useful advantages and features throughout the experience. And those… well, those, I’ve been relying on for years, and I had no idea they weren’t available for free watchers. I had taken them for granted, and it was only when I used YouTube on a secondary free account that I noticed they were missing.

It’s been a couple of years since YouTube introduced ‘Continue watching,’ a feature I never thought I used that often until I didn’t have it anymore on my secondary account. What this does is essentially pick up the video I was watching on one device and offer the suggestion to continue it on the second. So if I’m checking out our hands-on with the Nothing Phone 3 on my desktop and I step away for a bit, I can open YouTube on my phone to find the video already there on the bottom right, queued up for me.

This works across phones, web, and TV, and saves me time having to dig into my watch history or search to find that video I was just watching. It also feels freeing in a way, because I know I don’t have to stay in front of my TV or computer to finish watching a video; I can pick it up where I left off on my phone.

When I used my free YouTube account, this option wasn’t there. I immediately noticed that YouTube wasn’t offering my paused video as the first suggestion to watch, and I thought it was a bug or a setting I hadn’t enabled, but after looking into it, I realized it was only available for YouTube Premium subscribers. This is what sent me into this rabbit hole, looking for other similarly niche but practical Premium-only features.

I waited years for YouTube to gain queue management support, and when it first came to the web experience, I was thrilled. Then I waited even longer to see it on mobile, and now I can’t imagine using YouTube without it. When I’m researching a new trip destination, watching videos about a new phone or service for work, or deep-diving into robot mowers to pick one for my new garden, I tend to do a search on YouTube, scroll through all the results, and queue up the ones I want to watch. Then, I sit back and enjoy as it goes through them one by one. Queues are like my personal curation system, and they’ve become integral to my YouTube experience.

I assumed, though, that just like queues on a desktop, these were available for everyone. Turns out that Google has kept this option exclusive for Premium subscribers only on mobile phones and tablets. It feels like an aleatory choice, and it sucks that free users don’t get it. The best way to circumvent this is to create a temporary playlist and dump videos in it, watch them, then empty it when you’re done, i.e., not as practical as a simple queue.

I don’t always use Premium Controls because Google has made them annoying to enable and there’s no way to force them to show up by default on all videos. However, they do come in handy when I’m watching a video while cooking or working. They’re simple and generally big buttons that distill YouTube’s essence to two rows of icons: playback controls and frequent actions.

To me, the most important ones are the speed and quality pickers, because those usually require fiddling with pop-ups and sub-menus, and they become more accessible here. However, I wish Google made these customizable. I’d take a captions button over the stable volume toggle, while others may replace the like button with a sleep timer, for example.

There’s still work to be done here, and I feel like Premium Controls have the potential to become something like Google Meet’s On-The-Go or Spotify’s Car Mode: large and easy-to-hit essential buttons that work well when you’re busy doing something else. Until they’re perfected, maybe it’s a good thing that Premium Controls aren’t available for everyone.

I must’ve missed the memo when YouTube made downloads a paid feature. I still remember when the option first launched and was available to everyone, free and paid users alike. At the time, I didn’t have my YouTube Premium membership yet, and I was living in Lebanon, so I made a lot of use of downloads in spotty reception areas. I recall music video downloads not being possible for free users, but that seemed logical because it could replace Spotify, essentially.

Apparently, YouTube took this perk away from non-paying users a couple of years later and made it a Premium-only benefit. I was living in my posh Premium world by then, so I didn’t notice the change. What I think is sad, though, is that this also includes smart downloads, or YouTube’s tireless background work to keep a few videos available offline so you can watch anywhere, anytime.

Smart downloads have rescued me from deadly boredom when I’d been lazy and forgot to download things to watch on a trip, and that one time I was stuck in an underground subway for an hour with a very spotty signal. Having those videos ready, even if I hadn’t curated them myself, saved my sanity. I wish Google would offer smart downloads for free users, too, because it’s a very casual viewing experience that can come in handy, all without giving you control to download and watch exactly what you want.

I’d been hearing about the watch-together concept on Apple FaceTime, Plex, Jellyfin, and other apps and services, but not on Google Meet. It turns out Google already offers this, and you can start a watch-together session from your Meet call or start a Meet call while watching a YouTube video, easy peasy. I briefly tested it with my husband and we thought it was genius, so we plan on using this whenever one of us is away on a work trip.

It’s another odd perk to tie to Premium-only subscriptions, though, especially when Apple is offering it in FaceTime for everyone. I’ll file this also under the Google should offer it for free, but also publicize it more, and make it more accessible across messaging platforms like Google Messages and WhatsApp.

This sums up the odd and unexpected Premium-only perks complementing its ad-free and background play experience. Three of these — Continue Watching, queues in the mobile app, and smart downloads — are features I use every day, and personally, I’d pay for those more than background play or picture-in-picture. This deep dive has given me a bigger appreciation for my Premium membership; now, I know I’m getting more for my money than just ad removal.