YouTube Premium subscribers just got access to 5 new features

By James On Jun 30, 2024

If you pay for YouTube Premium every month, there are now five new features you can take advantage of, including YouTube Shorts, smart downloads, improved navigation and – of course – AI.

As explained in a message on the official YouTube blog, the new features are intended to give you more control over your YouTube experience. The post also notes that the number of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscribers now exceeds 100 million.

First up is a new skip feature, now available to US users on Android (and coming soon to iOS). If you double-tap to skip forward, you’ll see a button that takes you straight to the most popular part of the video, straight away. We previously heard of such a feature being tested, and there’s more on how it works here.

Then there’s picture-in-picture support for YouTube Shorts, now available on Android devices. This adds to the picture-in-picture experience already offered for standard videos, and means you can up your multitasking game.

Still experimental

Some new features are still labeled as experimental (Image credit: Future)

The other three new features are all marked as experimental and are accessible and enabled on the WebFor example, you can choose to enable smart downloads for YouTube Shorts, so you always have some small content to watch, even offline.

Then there’s conversational AI, for Android users in the US. This means you can ask an AI bot questions about the video you’re watching, via the Ask button below. This is in addition to the AI summaries that YouTube Premium subscribers already have access to.

And the final experimental feature is a redesigned watch page, which changes how video and other page furniture (including comments) are displayed on the screen. As with all of these experimental features, you’ll have the opportunity to provide feedback, good or bad.

While these new upgrades aren’t particularly big on their own, together with the other perks of YouTube Premium, they all add up. A subscription to the service currently costs $14 / £12 / AU$17 per month, which includes YouTube Music Premium.