video streaming

Google has announced that it is expanding the availability of the recently added cheaper tier of YouTube Premium. The YouTube Premium Lite package costs a little over half the price of the regular YouTube Premium subscription which should serve as a lure to potential customers who have been sitting on the fence.

The lower price, inevitably, means having to make some compromises, but YouTube Premium Lite delivers what most people will be looking for – a broadly ad-free experience on YouTube.

Following the lead of just about every website and social platform, YouTube is introducing comment threading. But before you get too excited about gaining the ability to view nested replies and being able to follow conversations more easily, there are a couple of quirks.

Firstly, this is – for now, at least – limited to the iOS and Android apps, so if you access YouTube via a web browser, you are out of luck. Secondly, this is an experiment so try not to get too attached to it.

YouTube is finally rolling out Premium Lite in the USA (coming soon to Thailand, Germany, and Australia). For the princely sum of $7.99 per month, Google is promising subscribers a mostly ad-free experience.

Although Premium Lite offers an official way to remove ads, it won't hide those baked directly into videos by creators. That’s right, even if you shell out for this plan, you’ll still have to sit through sponsored segments for VPNs, meal kits, and mobile games, because YouTube can’t really do anything about those. Quite frankly, that just doesn’t seem fair.