YouTube Premium Members Can Test New Experimental Features

Google is making a couple of new experimental features available for testing for YouTube Premium users today. One of the biggest ones is high-quality audio (256kbps) for music videos on YouTube, but there are also other changes to improve the viewing experience on desktop and mobile. As usual, these new features can be enabled on youtube.com/new.

The “Jump ahead” feature that was previously launched on mobile is now available on the web. As its name suggests, it lets users seamlessly jump ahead to the most interesting parts of a video. On mobile, however, YouTube Premium users will soon get access to expanded playback speed options up to 4x.

iOS users are also getting two new experimental features for YouTube Shorts videos: The first one is Picture-in-Picture support for these vertical videos, and the second one will automatically download a selection of recommended Shorts videos for offline viewing when the “Smart Downloads” feature is enabled.

The YouTube team also announced today that will soon expand access to the AI-powered “Ask Music” feature to Android subscribers in the UK and Ireland. This feature can generate a personalized radio station from a natural language prompt. Additionally, iOS users will get access to YouTube’s conversational AI tool that lets users ask a chatbot questions about the video they’re currently watching.

Lastly, Google is now offering a $2/month discount on YouTube Premium subscriptions to US users with Google One Premium plan ($9.99/month) or higher. The YouTube Premium individual plan is currently priced at $13.99 per month without that new monthly discount.