YouTube Premium may be one of the best value-for-money streaming subscriptions, but it still has plenty of room for improvement. Google addressed some of the issues by launching another subscription tier, Premium Lite, earlier this year, with a lower subscription cost and fewer Premium features.
The Mountain View tech giant hasn’t introduced any substantial changes to YouTube’s Premium offerings since then, but it has quietly rolled out something big for free users – one that’s gone mostly unnoticed until now.
Google hasn’t launched anything exclusive to free users. Instead, it added something that had long been available only to Premium users for years: Downloads. However, for free users, the Downloads capability isn’t the same as the one in the Premium offering.
YouTube Premium’s Downloads feature is now available for free users
But you may still not like it
As first spotted by u/Dude_Who_Does_Things on Reddit, Google has started allowing free users to download videos on YouTube to watch later without an internet connection. We’ve tested this one on our devices and can confirm that it’s working. However, the only caveat here is the download quality.
With a YouTube Premium subscription, you can download videos in Full HD (1080p), as well as at lower resolutions like 720p, giving you the flexibility to choose whatever suits you best. However, the Downloads feature for YouTube free users limits it to just 360p and 144p. It’s also worth noting that free users don’t get unlimited downloads as the Premium feature.
All of this might sound slightly disappointing for free users, but this was the only logical way Google could introduce the feature to non-Premium users. However, these aren’t the only limitations in the Downloads feature for free users.
The Downloads feature won’t work for music videos on YouTube on free accounts. If you want to download your favorite music videos for offline viewing, that will still require a Premium subscription, which costs $13.99 for an individual plan and $22.99 for a family plan.
Since YouTube Premium Lite doesn’t have the Downloads capability, you can’t bypass the above-mentioned limitations by subscribing to it. That’s why YouTube pushes free users to the full Premium plan, which gives you unlimited downloads and support for higher resolutions. Nevertheless, if you are a free user and are okay with those restrictions, the ability to download videos is a welcome change.
