YouTube’s striking yet another blow in its ongoing war against ads, though it hasn’t left us frothing at the mouth quite like the rest of the platform’s more recent changes. It’s looking to expand its range of YouTube Premium tiers, up from the individual, student or family plans it currently serves, the company announced yesterday through a community blog post.
Oh, and lest we forget (no matter how hard we try) about the platform’s newly announced features landing on the service for Premium members — supposedly built with community feedback in mind. Having tried one of the new features for ourselves, we find that hard to believe. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Premium Pro Plus™ when?
“We’re committed to bringing members more plan options by expanding our existing offers to more regions, while also introducing new plans and exploring ways for you to share your benefits with friends in the future!” wrote Hazel, a YouTube employee.
Unfortunately, that’s all the company had to say on the subject for the time being. But if it involves surgically removing YouTube Music from the main YouTube Premium subscription — for a cheaper price — we reckon Google may have a whole lot more subscribers on their hands.
Until it gets around to altering the subscription business, you’ll need to make do with the service as is. Picking up a Premium subscription as it exists gets you access to ad-free YouTube, YouTube Music and a whole lot of the services Premium-only benefits such as an increased bitrate at the 1080p level.
Read More: YouTube is X-rating, will add Community Notes-like feature to videos
And of course, there are those new features we mentioned earlier, which are exclusive to paying members. Up first is ‘Jump Ahead’, an AI-powered feature (insert eye roll here) that’ll automatically determine a video’s best bits and help you get there at the tap of a button. It’s already available to Android users in the US, with iOS users expected to receive the update “in the next few weeks.” There’s no word on a South African launch date just yet.
Unfortunately, we can’t say the same for the other new feature — picture-in-picture (PiP) Shorts. Have you ever come back to yourself after a 45-minute brainrot Shorts session only to immediately close the app to get on with your day? That’s no longer possible, thanks to PiP shorts, which automatically cling to your home screen like a bad smell that just won’t go away until fumble around long enough to hit the minute ‘X’.
At the time of writing, there is no way to disable PiP Shorts, which is available to all Android-touting Premium members, without also disabling the PiP feature for ‘regular’ videos on the platform. Believe us. We’ve tried.