Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month

Mustafa Albazy@programming.dev to Technology@beehaw.org – 168 points –
Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month
9to5google.com

The price of an individual YouTube Premium subscription is increasing by $2 to $13.99 per month in the US for new and current customers.

This price increase is live for new subscribers as seen on youtube.com/premium. Instead of $11.99, YouTube Premium now costs $13.99/month. Meanwhile, it’s $18.99 if you’re subscribing from the iOS YouTube app.

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I need to have a serious talk about this with my girlfriend. I didn’t realize she was paying so much for our YT Premium plan.

These prices are getting ridiculous.

What are you guys getting for that money? I honestly don't know. I just use either an ad blocker or the newpipe app.

It's a global solution, not just localized to specific areas. No ads on my account on my Xbox, PS5, Switch, Google Home speakers (YouTube Music), Fire TV Stick, Android TV, Roku, my roommate's Roku, or anyone else's devices anywhere else, in addition to places like my phone and PC where I just use uBlock Origin.

In addition, I'm actually just splitting the family plan across three people, so it's like $7.64/mo, which isn't bad.

Yeah with that many devices that's worth the ease of use for the price. I'm surprised they don't block more than one device.

While ad blockers are definitely a thing, I'd also like my favorite channels to get paid. And, honestly, it has to make money somehow -- it might as well be off my relatively stable back

I'm not so enamored with feeding the bloated behemoth that is Google but I do like the fact the revenue share with creators gets them more per view than they would with ad rolls. It's a shame you still have to manually skip sponsorship sections on the mobile app.

I agree with you. In an ideal world, I would give 22 dollars to Patreon every month, they would scan my watch history and would distribute 20 dollars proportionally among the channels I watched without Google taking a cut.

Then Google could drop the price of premium instead of raising it and keep that whole fee.

That was the flattr model but it never really took off.

Wow, that's actually exactly what I was wishing for. I think I'm going to toss in $10 and see how it goes

Does your ad blocker block ads for YouTube and YouTube Music apps on iOS?

I use safari with adguard + sponsor block which lets me airplay videos to the TV. I don't even have the YouTube app installed. No need to try and set up smarttubenext or whatever on the TV.

Are you able to cast at 4k or 1080p? I used to have youtube premium but moved to the same setup on my phone; ad blocker, sponsor block, youtube mobile, cast to tv. My one issue is that the youtube player only lets me select up to 720p for stream quality, and that doesn’t look fantastic on a tv.

Looks like it is up to only 720p. Never been bothered by it myself for the type of content I've air played. Not ideal for movies or TV shows though.

I tend to only listen to youtube videos and only cast them when I want to be able to see the images, since I mostly watch history videos.

I did notice the other day that with an iPad I can select 1080p, which is perfect! I’m not sure what exactly is causing the difference, maybe youtube sees safari on an iPad as different somehow, but that’s solved my one little issue I had.

I guess you need an Apple TV for that as well?

Airplay seems pretty useless to me overall as I don’t have anything it seems to want to connect with. Sadly.

My TV has airplay support built into it so I haven't needed to get an Apple TV. But you do need an Apple device to use Airplay.

Yeah have lots of apple devices but never a TV with airplay. They all seem to have Chromecast where I live.

Guess I’m buying the wrong TVs :)

What brand do you have? If they have Android TV they seem to usually have airplay support too, but you need to go into settings and then get your Apple device paired with the TV to get airplay to start working.

Right now just a cheep Aldi TV, but am considering upgrading my PS4 (PS5 slim on the horizon?) and might splurge on a good TV to match. Will be sure to check out the airplay options.

We push a lot of content up to our TV via Chromecast. But AirPlay would be more convenient.

It'll probably be a 4k tv then? LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, and Vizio seem to all have airplay support for TVs released recently these days. If Android TV it's easy to side load smarttubenext, but never bothered due to finding airplay convent enough.

Until then it might be worth checking out to see if you can get smarttubenext installed on your chromecast

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/apk-smarttubenext-android-tv.3949377/

For YouTube, uYou+ blocks ads and sponsors.

For YouTube Music, YouTubeMusicUltimate blocks ads and sponsors, too.

Anyone can sideload those relatively easily. Still, if you don't want to bother with this, you can find apps on the AppStore that do pretty much the same thing, like Yattee or Video Lite (there's a paid subscription for this one but if you block ads at the DNS level you won't see anything.)

The big part for us is the multiple users, and not under a single home location.

My girlfriend, myself, her kid, adult daughter. That ends up being a fairly decent value proposition considering we’re pretty invested in Apple devices. There aren’t a lot of solutions to remove ads, and we take advantage of both the music and video sides of things.

I never even considered using for a family account. That's smart.