Two New Features in YouTube Premium Lite Make the More Expensive Plan Unnecessary.
As Lifehacker has previously argued , YouTube Premium is probably the best streaming service for most people. Ads can eat up your free time faster than you think, and since user-generated videos on YouTube are quite short, they’re especially annoying—and quite difficult to block without a paid subscription .
YouTube Premium is also quite expensive for a streaming service, at $14 per month. Fortunately, the company also offers a much cheaper “Premium Lite” plan, which, thanks to the recent addition of several key features, is now on par with the full subscription. In fact, at $8 per month, YouTube Premium Lite may now be the best paid YouTube plan for most users.
YouTube Premium Lite will get two of the best features of the more expensive plan.
Starting today, YouTube Premium Lite now offers both background playback and downloads for most videos, features previously only available with the full YouTube Premium plan. The update is currently rolling out, so it may take some time to reach you, but essentially, this change gives you the same experience as the full YouTube Premium plan across the vast majority of YouTube content. YouTube says it “received feedback about the desire to include these additional features in the service,” which is the reason for the change.
Now, for the same $8 per month, you can get most of the features of YouTube Premium, usually available for $14 per month. The only catch? You’ll still see ads when streaming music and music videos, hence the “most videos” caveat. Ads also “may appear while searching or browsing,” but what about interruptions when viewing non-music content? That shouldn’t be a problem.
For most users, a full YouTube premium account no longer makes sense.
Essentially, if you’re not an active YouTube Music user, upgrading to YouTube Premium Lite instead of a full subscription is now the obvious choice. You’ll lose a few small perks, like the ability to “fast-forward” (instantly skip frequently skipped parts of a video, usually commercials), but the subscription will also be roughly half the price. You win some, you lose some.
The only real drawback, at least for me, is that for families with many different viewers, YouTube Premium Lite is still only available for one profile at a time. So, if each member of your family wants to use their own algorithms instead of sharing a single profile, you’ll need to sign up for a YouTube Premium Family subscription, which costs $23 per month and provides six people in a single household with the benefits of a full YouTube Premium subscription. My husband and I have quite different viewing habits, so we’re unlikely to switch to this cheaper plan anytime soon. But if you live alone or are happy with using a single profile, you can save money.
Alternatively, you can also purchase the YouTube Music Premium plan for $11 per month. It disables ads and allows background playback and downloads, but only for music and music videos. Essentially, it’s the opposite of YouTube Premium Lite and faces stiff competition from services like Spotify and Apple Music . Personally, I’d simply pay more for the full YouTube Premium subscription, which offers all the same benefits as YouTube Music Premium but also covers non-music content, and costs just $3 more per month.
However, while the addition of new features to Premium Lite ultimately means a discount, this follows YouTube’s move to block free access to background playback . Perhaps this is Google’s attempt at compromise?