YouTube has added background playback and offline downloads to its Premium Lite subscription tier, extending two features that were previously exclusive to the full Premium plan without raising the $7.99/£7.99 per month price point.
The update arrives roughly a year after YouTube expanded the Premium Lite pilot from its original markets in Thailand, Germany, and Australia into the United States, and subsequently into Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, Mexico, and parts of Europe and Asia.
Premium Lite is below the standard YouTube Premium tier, which costs $13.99/£12.99 and covers all content, including YouTube Music, a category that the cheaper plan deliberately excludes.
Background play allows subscribers to continue audio from most videos while the phone screen is off or another app is running in the foreground, a function that Google moved to restrict through mobile browsers less than a month before announcing its availability on Premium Lite.
Offline downloads give Premium Lite subscribers the ability to save most videos for playback without an internet connection. This capability had previously served as one of the clearer functional dividing lines between the Lite and full Premium tiers.
Both features apply to most non-music content, which means videos across gaming, fashion, beauty, cooking, and news categories qualify, while music videos, Shorts, and search and browse pages continue to display ads regardless of subscription tier.
For a full breakdown of what each tier covers and where the two plans differ, our guide on YouTube Premium Lite vs Premium covers everything worth knowing before committing to either subscription.
What Premium remains for
The full Premium tier still holds an exclusive set of features, including queue management, jump ahead, continue watching, and access to YouTube Music Premium, giving the higher-priced plan a clear product identity beyond the ad-free and playback functionality now shared with Lite.
YouTube’s subscription segment has grown considerably, with parent company Alphabet reporting more than 325 million paid subscriptions across its consumer services as of its most recent earnings report, a figure that reflects sustained demand for ad-free video access across its platform.
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