YouTube Premium Lite Costs Less, But It Is Missing Key Benefits
YouTube Premium Lite offers an ad-free video watching experience for those on a tight budget, but it skips a few of the standard plan’s key features.
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Google has started testing a new tier of its YouTube Premium subscription that’s called YouTube Premium Lite. This also marks the first time that the service has experimented with a lower-priced tier with watered-down benefits, following in the footsteps of Netflix and rival streaming services. Originally unveiled as YouTube Red back in 2015, the service was officially renamed YouTube Premium in May of 2018, and has followed the same naming scheme ever since. It was also the year when YouTube Music was launched as a separate subscription service for music listening, and the price went up as well.
YouTube Premium offers an ad-free video watching experience across the mobile app and web. As a nice freebie, a YouTube Premium subscription also comes with YouTube Music access for free. Other YouTube Premium benefits include the ability to download videos for offline viewing, access to YouTube Originals, and background play for both audio and video. Some of the benefits such as ad-free viewing and the ability to download content also extend to the YouTube Kids app. However, at $11.99, it’s not the most value-centric service around, especially for video when the likes of Netflix offer cheaper plans.
First spotted by a Resetera user, Google has officially started testing a YouTube Premium Lite subscription that is priced at €6.99 per month (or local equivalent depending on the region). The usual subscription cost is €11.99 per month. As per a statement shared with The Verge, Google is testing the service in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden as of now. It appears that Google is currently soak-testing the YouTube Premium Lite subscription in a handful of European countries only, and will eventually expand it to more regions depending on the market reception.
Easy On The Pockets, But Missing Core Benefits
The official YouTube Premium Lite page mentions only one benefit of using the service, and that is ad-free viewing. This applies across all platforms such as mobile, web and desktop, and YouTube Kids as well. Of course, users need to sign in with the same Google account on all devices. However, some of the key benefits have been eschewed, with the most notable one being YouTube Music access, which itself took over from Google Play Music not too long ago. Another notable omission is the ability to download videos for offline viewing, a feature that comes in handy when users are don’t have enough network bandwidth or data allowance to stream videos on the go.
Background play has also gone, and the website doesn’t mention access to YouTube Originals either. It appears that Google is primarily offering YouTube Premium Lite as a more affordable tier to folks who don’t qualify for the student discount and are primarily concerned with an ad-free video-watching experience. It remains to be seen if, and when, the subscription tier makes its way to other markets. YouTube Premium is a key pathway to make up for lost revenue from ad-blocking, and Google has been pushing it with such fervor that it even started offering free Stadia controllers and Chromecast Ultras to subscribers last year. The Lite tier only cements the belief that the bait of ad-free viewing will now be dangled even more aggressively by Google to get more users hooked to it.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/youtube-premium-lite-subscription-cheaper-missing-features/