Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- YouTube Premium Lite is back from the dead, after seemingly being canceled a year ago.
- Google’s currently running Premium Lite tests in Australia, Germany, and Thailand.
- It’s not clear yet what Google’s long-term plans are here.
YouTube Premium has got to be one of the most contentious paid versions of a streaming service. There’s good reason for that, as it’s unlike most of the rest out there, offering free access to basically everything — if you sit through some ads. And that’s sometimes quite a few ads. Today we’re learning about one way that YouTube is looking to give viewers a way to eliminate those ads without requiring a full-blown Premium subscription, as Google confirms that it’s brought back Premium Lite for some new testing.
Premium Lite, you may remember, was basically a half-priced YouTube Premium plan that got rid of ads, but that was pretty much it — no background playback, no YouTube Music, no extra perks. But for what it was, that might hit the value sweet-spot for a lot of viewers. While it had been available for some nations in the past, we got word about a year ago that YouTube was shutting Lite down.
Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves running into fresh reports of YouTube Premium Lite being advertised to users. We reached out to Google mostly out of confusion, thinking that Premium Lite was soundly in the past, but the company ultimately confirmed to Android Authority that this is a new, active test:
We’re testing a different version of Premium Lite and some users in Australia, Germany and Thailand may see the option to sign up.
That still leaves a ton of uncertainty out there concerning future plans for the subscription offering. Different how? Will that soon expand to additional nations? How many users in these markets are even being invited to sign up for Lite? And maybe our biggest question would be what’s up with the backtracking here, and why does Google appear to be doing an about-face on its plans? That shouldn’t be necessarily a criticism — we like paying less for nice things as much as the next guy — but it’s still quite odd.
Hopefully Google comes forward with some sort of unified approach to Premium Lite soon. And if it ever wanted to make it available in the US, we wouldn’t complain.