YouTube revealed in a community post on Thursday that it is developing new plans for its YouTube Premium subscriptions. A YouTube staff member using the handle Hazel wrote, “We are committed to offering members more plan alternatives by expanding our existing offers to more regions, while also launching new plans and investigating ways for you to share your benefits with friends in the future.“
There are very few YouTube Premium options available right now: Monthly costs are $13.99 for an individual (or $139.99 for a 12-month subscription); $22.99 for a family; and $7.99 for students. Benefits from subscribing include access to the YouTube Music library without advertisements, ad-free viewing of videos, and the option to download videos for offline viewing. YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Thursday’s post did not describe what any of the new plans may look like or what benefits you might be able to share.
Both the community article and the independent blog post describe the additional capabilities that YouTube is rolling out for Premium users. The recently released “skip forward” feature driven by AI will make its way to iOS “in the coming few weeks.” Picture-in-picture viewing of YouTube Shorts on Android will be possible for Premium members (a functionality that is already available on TikTok).
A few experiments will also be available to premium subscribers to choose from, such as batch downloading of Shorts to your phone for offline viewing, a conversational AI assistant (which the company is reintroducing after a previous test), and a redesign of the watch page on desktop.
