YouTube plans to launch new offers for its Premium subscriptions: “ We’re committed to giving our members more options by expanding our existing offerings to more regions, while introducing new plans and exploring ways to share your benefits with friends in the future “, YouTube said in a post on the platform’s community site.
Premium subscribers pampered by YouTube
Currently, subscribers can choose between these plans: the individual subscription at €12.99 per month, the family subscription at €24 per month, and the student subscription at €7.99 per month. These subscriptions remove the increasingly invasive advertising in videos, but also the ability to download content to watch offline, as well as ad-free access to the YouTube Music library.
YouTube launched the 1080p Premium Enhanced Bitrate feature last year, providing even higher viewing quality. Thursday’s release did not specify details of the new plans or the potential benefits users could enjoy.
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Along with these new plans, YouTube announced the addition of new features for Premium subscribers. One of the highlights is the AI-powered “jump ahead” feature, which recently launched on Android and will be available on iOS in the coming weeks. This feature analyzes viewing data and identifies the most popular segments of a video, allowing users to jump directly to those highlights with a button that appears when double-tapping a video.
Android users will also be able to view Shorts in picture-in-picture (PIP) mode, a feature already available on TikTok. This feature allows you to watch Shorts while using other apps. On paper, it’s interesting, but as their name suggests, Shorts are short videos that are consumed very quickly; they are not really intended to be watched in a corner of your screen.
Premium subscribers will also have access to several experiments that they can choose to participate in. These new features include the automatic downloading of a batch of Shorts to the smartphone for offline viewing, an umpteenth AI bot (reintroduced after a previous test), and a revised and improved viewing web page on desktop computers.
All these new features will help to strengthen the appeal of the Premium offer to subscribers, and above all to attract new customers. The subscription has become an important source of revenue for Google, which is also relentlessly hunting down ad blockers.
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