YouTube Is Testing a “Premium Lite” Subscription Plan

The “Premium Lite” plan is 40 per cent cheaper than the regular YouTube Premium plan and offers an ad-free viewing experience.

YouTube is testing a replacement cheaper paid subscription plan for its streaming service. Dubbed YouTube Premium Lite, the new plan will allow subscribers to observe videos on YouTube without ads. But, unfortunately, it’ll miss out on all other features that are a neighbourhood of the costlier YouTube Premium plan.

Apart from an ad-free viewing experience, YouTube Premium offers background video playback, offline downloads, and more.

YouTube Experimenting with Cheaper “Premium Lite” Plan

YouTube is currently experimenting with a replacement YouTube Premium Lite plan priced at €6.99 in selected parts of Europe. For comparison, the regular YouTube Premium subscription costs €11.99 per month. In the US, YouTube Premium is priced at $9.99/month.

The new cheaper Premium Lite plan will be an excellent option for users who want to observe videos without ads on YouTube and do not care much about the opposite features.

A ResetEra user first spotted the new YouTube Premium Lite plan before YouTube confirmed that it’s indeed testing a less expensive YouTube subscription plan. Below is that the statement issued by a YouTube spokesperson to The Verge:

“In Nordics and Benelux (except for Iceland), we’re testing a replacement offering to offer users even more choice: Premium Lite costs €6.99/month (or local equivalent per month) and it includes ad-free videos on YouTube.”

The “Premium Lite” plan is being tested by YouTube in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

YouTube Premium Lite will offer an ad-free YouTube viewing experience across all major platforms, including iPhone, Android, Smart TVs, and gaming consoles. In addition, ads won’t be displayed within the YouTube Kids app as a neighbourhood of the subscription. However, YouTube Premium Lite won’t include ad-free access to YouTube Music. Instead, ads are going to be played between songs.

Other features that are a neighbourhood of the regular YouTube Premium subscription but will be missing from Premium Lite include background music playback, Picture-in-Picture support, offline downloads, and access to YouTube Premium original content.

YouTube Premium Lite Is Light on Features, Not Pricing

While YouTube Premium Lite is undoubtedly an attractive proposition compared to the regular YouTube Premium subscription for several, it’s not substantially cheaper than the latter. It only offers an ad-free viewing experience on YouTube, but it’s only 40 per cent cheaper than the YouTube Premium subscription.

YouTube does state that it’s currently experimenting with the Premium Lite plan, so there’s always an opportunity for the corporate to tweaking the pricing and have set supported user feedback.