Still without a YouTube Premium subscription? After Google recently raised prices in South Africa, we can’t blame you — even the plan is still one of the better value-for-money services out there at R82/m. But your stubbornness is about to pay off. YouTube’s non-paying users are receiving a once-Premium feature: downloads.
Feel good to be free
It’s a change for the platform’s free users that’s gone mostly under the radar. Perhaps YouTube’s free users were too afraid to bring what might be a mistake to YouTube’s attention. That was until a Reddit user (u/Dude_Who_Does_Things) accidentally clicked the download button on the platform.
We immediately logged into a non-Premium account on mobile and desktop to see if the change had been implemented locally, and were glad to find that it had. Sit through the two or three ads the video serves up, and a ‘download’ button will appear in the toolbar, no questions asked.
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There is one catch, though, and that’s quality. Free users may have unlocked the download button, but they’ll have to settle for watching their content on the lower end of quality. Weirdly, we noticed a distinction between downloads on mobile and PC. On mobile, we only had two options — 144/360p, while desktop offered 144/480p downloads, with the rest cordoned off behind a paywall.
Okay, fine. There’s another catch. And that’s free users being unable to download music videos on the platform, regardless of the quality or the age of the video. We get it — artists gotta art (and get paid) — but since YouTube downloads remain inside the app, this feels unwarranted. Still, we’re not complaining.
1 Comment
This is not a new Feature. Im a free Google users and ALWAYS had the download button. They have changed the Quality setting you can download at a few years back already.