Four New Experimental YouTube Premium Features That Launched This Week

YouTube Premium is expanding its list of paid-only features—at least, for those who are willing to experiment.

In a blog post last week, the company announced a handful of new experimental features available to Premium subscribers. These features, while not enabled by default, can be switched on from youtube.com/new, and can be used until they expire. In addition, YouTube also announced a Premium discount for Google One subscriptions.

Faster playback speeds on iOS and Android

This feature wasn’t actually available when YouTube announced it in its blog post. In the week since, however, it appears to have rolled out to Premium users. With it, you can boost a video’s playback speed on mobile up to 4x speed. (Current speed boosts are capped at 2x.) As for who would want to watch or listen to content at that speed, I cannot say. If that sounds like your cup of tea, however, you can try out this feature from now until Feb. 26.

Higher-quality music

YouTube Premium is adding a new high-quality audio bitrate for music videos. Now, songs can be up to 256kbps, matching the highest audio quality found on YouTube Music. This feature is only available on iOS and Android at the moment, from now through Feb. 22.

Jump Ahead (on the web)

Jump Ahead is an AI-powered YouTube feature that analyzes watch behavior on any given video to determine its “best” part, offering to “jump ahead” to that section. YouTube originally rolled out the feature as a test nearly a year ago, and has since made it a YouTube Premium option on mobile. Now, you can access it on the web as an experimental feature, from now until Feb. 5.

Picture-in-picture for Shorts

Picture-in-picture (or PiP) is a useful way to watch a video while multitasking on your device. If the video in question is a YouTube Short, however, PiP won’t work, presumably because, well, the videos are quite short.

If you have a Premium subscription, though, you can enable an experimental feature that lets you watch Shorts in PiP. I suppose that’s good news for extremely busy viewers who want to watch a video that’s 60 seconds or less, but need to get back to work immediately. Curiously, this feature is only available on iOS, and only until Feb. 19.

Automatic Shorts downloads

Speaking of Shorts, a new Premium experimental feature will automatically download Shorts for offline viewing. This feature is also an iOS exclusive: When you sign up for the experimental feature, you can head to the Downloads section of YouTube and scroll to “Smart Downloads,” where you’ll find any recently downloaded Shorts. This feature is available through Feb. 19.

YouTube Premium discount through Google One

Google is also rolling out a new discount for YouTube Premium when it’s purchased with a Google One Premium subscription (or higher). Google One Premium starts at $9.99 per month, and while YouTube Premium typically costs $13.99 per month, you can drop that cost to 11.99 per month. That’s not a huge savings, but I do think it’ll be an interesting offer for anyone who already subscribes to both or has one of the two subscriptions and is on the fence about subscribing to the other.

If you’re thinking, “Wait: I pay $19 a month for YouTube Premium. What’s this about $14 a month?” that means you likely subscribed in the app, rather than the website (at least on iOS). Companies frequently increase the costs of subscriptions in apps versus on the web, since they need to pay a 30% tax to Apple or Google. If you subscribed through the Android app, you probably didn’t have this premium hike.