If you’re paying out for YouTube Premium every month, there are five new features now rolling out for you to take advantage of, covering YouTube Shorts, smart downloads, improved navigation, and – of course – AI.
As explained in a post on the official YouTube blog, the new features aim to give you more control over your YouTube experience. The post also mentions that the number of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium subscribers now exceeds 100 million.
First up is a new skip feature, available now to US users on Android (and coming to iOS soon). If you double-tap to skip ahead, you’ll see a button that takes you right to the most popular part of the video, direct. We’d previously heard that such a feature was being tested, and there’s more on how it works here.
Then there’s picture-in-picture support for YouTube Shorts, available now on Android devices. This adds to the picture-in-picture experience that’s already offered for standard videos, and means you can up your multitasking game.
Still experimental
The other three new features are all labeled as experimental, and can be accessed and enabled on the web. You can choose to enable smart downloads for YouTube Shorts, for example, so you’ve always got some bite-sized 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 underneath it. This is in addition to the AI summaries that YouTube Premium subscribers can already access.
And the last experimental feature is a redesigned watch page, which rejigs how video and other page furniture (including the comments) gets shown on screen. As with all of these experimental features, you have the option to leave feedback, good or bad.
While these new upgrades aren’t particularly big on their own, together with the other perks of YouTube Premium, it all adds up. A subscription to the service currently costs $14 / £12 / AU$17 a month, and includes YouTube Music Premium.
