YouTube Premium might gain new membership plans

Summary

• YouTube is exploring new Premium plans to enable you to share benefits with friends.
• The company acknowledges issues with Premium controls and is working to speed up access to them.
• It is also working to improve the download experience and fix storage issues.

Google just rolled out several features for YouTube Premium subscribers, allowing you to jump to the more exciting parts of a video, view Shorts in a Picture-in-Picture (PiP) window, and more. But these are not the only improvements that the company has announced today. It is working on many more changes and updates to the platform, some of which were detailed by a YouTube team member on its community forum. Among other things, YouTube is considering introducing new Premium plans that better suit your requirements.

In the post on the YouTube community forums (via The Verge), Team YouTube’s Hazel says that the company wants to introduce additional paid tiers and is “exploring ways for you to share your benefits with friends in the future.” YouTube currently offers three monthly paid plans: a Premium subscription that costs $13.99 and a family plan, which allows you to add up to five family members, for $22.99. The third is a student plan that costs $7.99 per month.

YouTube did not provide any hints on what tiers it plans to introduce, though it intends to expand its existing membership plans to more regions. The video-sharing platform could launch a cheaper, ad-free paid tier without other Premium perks. Or it could consider introducing a Spotify Duo-like membership plan, where you can share the subscription with a loved one.

With YouTube Premium becoming more expensive over the last year and the company cracking down on hacky ways to get cheaper subscriptions, a more affordable tier with fewer features might appeal to a wider audience.

YouTube working to speed up access to Premium controls

Additionally, YouTube acknowledges issues with losing queues and difficulty accessing Premium controls. It is working on addressing these problems. The company will also ensure that the Continue watching feature only applies to the videos you are watching and not your playback queue.

Lastly, YouTube notes that it is looking to improve the download experience in its app and fix all storage-related issues that many users continue to face. However, this is an “evergreen workstream” for the team, and there’s always more work required on this front.