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While the ad-free experience is the main draw for most YouTube Premium subscribers, the service also comes with a host of other perks and experimental features designed to enhance your viewing experience. In a new announcement, YouTube has confirmed that several of these great features are now graduating from their experimental phase and expanding to more of the devices you use every day.
Better viewing on the big screen and the web
Some of the most exciting expansions are coming to the non-mobile YouTube experience. First up, the fantastic “Jump ahead” feature, which uses AI to let you seamlessly skip to the most interesting or relevant parts of a video, is now fully available on Smart TVs and Gaming Consoles. This is a huge quality-of-life improvement for the living room experience.
For those of you who watch on a desktop or Chromebook, the more granular faster playback speeds are now fully available on the web. This allows you to fine-tune playback up to 4x speed in precise 0.05 increments, a feature that was previously only available on mobile.
Finally, the “High-quality audio” option, which provides a richer listening experience for official music videos, is now a standard, fully available feature for both Android and iOS in the main YouTube app, graduating from its experimental status.
New Shorts perks for iOS users
Premium subscribers who use an iPhone are also getting a couple of great new features for Shorts, bringing the iOS app to parity with its Android counterpart. Shorts Smart Downloads, which automatically saves Shorts for offline viewing based on your watch history, is now fully available on iOS. Additionally, Shorts Picture-in-Picture (PiP) is also making its full debut, allowing you to keep a Short playing in a small window while you browse other content.
This is a great set of updates that adds even more value to the YouTube Premium subscription. It’s fantastic to see YouTube continuing to roll out thoughtful, useful perks for its paying members across all the different platforms we use to watch.
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