YouTube Premium has many benefits—ad-free access to YouTube and YouTube Music, which, for some people, is worth the price of admission alone. Some of the other perks of YouTube Premium, however, are more basic features that other apps offer for free.
Background playback
Background playback lets the audio from whatever you’re playing on YouTube continue when you close the app or even when your screen is off. If you’re following a recipe from a YouTube video, for example, you don’t want the instructions to suddenly stop when your screen turns off. Trying to unlock your phone with raw chicken all over your hands is far from ideal.
Unfortunately, unless you have a YouTube Premium subscription, background playback isn’t an option. As soon as you switch to another app, YouTube will stop playing, so you can no longer listen to the audio from whatever you were watching.
To make matters worse, it used to be possible to use third-party browsers to get background playback to work even without a YouTube Premium subscription. However, Google has taken deliberate steps to block this, confirming to Android Authority that this was done deliberately because “background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.”
It’s annoying that other apps don’t feel the need to lock down what could be viewed as a basic feature. For example, you can use background playback with Spotify even if you don’t have a Spotify subscription. Even if you pay for a cheaper YouTube Premium Lite subscription, which removes ads on some videos, you still don’t get a feature that Spotify offers for free.
Picture-in-picture for music videos
Picture-in-picture (PiP) is a similar feature. Unlike background playback, which keeps the audio playing but hides the video, PiP keeps a smaller floating window on top of your current app. This means that you can keep watching the video while you use other apps.
If you’re in the US, the good news is that you can use PiP on your phone without a YouTube Premium subscription for most content. However, the feature is blocked for music videos; if you want to use PiP for music, you’ll need to pay for YouTube Premium.
If you live outside the US, the situation is even worse. PiP is unavailable for all YouTube content—not just music—unless you have a YouTube Premium subscription.
Once again, this is a feature that other similar services offer at no extra cost. For example, you can use the Twitch app to watch video content using picture-in-picture without the need for a subscription, even if you’re outside of the US.
Offline downloads
Another “perk” of YouTube Premium is offline downloads. This allows you to save content from YouTube to your device so that you can watch it back even without an internet connection. For example, if you’re going on a long flight, you can download some YouTube content and watch it on the flight, even with your phone in airplane mode.
If you want to do so, however, you’ll need a full YouTube Premium subscription. Even Premium Lite subscribers can’t download videos for offline playback, despite paying $7.99 per month.
While there aren’t any similar services that offer offline playback completely for free, streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ allow you to download content as part of their standard subscription packages. Unlike with YouTube, you don’t need to pay for a “premium” subscription to download offline content.
Faster playback speeds
As a free YouTube user, I can change the playback speed for videos, setting it to anything from 0.25x to 2x the normal speed. With YouTube Premium, you can increase the playback speed up to 4x.
However, there have been reports of some users losing access to all playback speeds if they weren’t YouTube Premium subscribers. Some of these issues appear to have been related to the use of ad blockers, but the official @TeamYouTube account acknowledged the problem on X as a known bug and linked to a community thread that no longer exists.
Some users are still reporting that they are experiencing the issue, causing some to speculate that YouTube may be experimenting with seeing if people are willing to pay for access to the feature. Whether this is a bug or deliberate, this is yet another example of a feature where some of the functionality (speeds above 2x) has been blocked for free users.
YouTube Premium is a great option for people who are happy to pay to remove the annoying ads that free YouTube users have to live with. Some users, however, may prefer to put up with ads or simply can’t afford yet another subscription. For those people, it feels like a kick in the teeth that features that come as standard on other services are locked behind a paywall.
Offering additional features for premium subscriptions is fine, but moving basic features behind a paywall doesn’t make something feel more premium; it just makes free YouTube feel deliberately worse.
