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Comment by Fr0styMatt88 | Hacker News Reader

Okay just in case someone who knows reads this. Why doesn’t Youtube Premium background play work with members-only videos?

Became a member of a channel with spoken content and can’t even lock my phone when playing a member’s only video.

Posts and complaints on this go back years, with zero explanation from Youtube as to why this is, if it’s intentional or a bug, etc.

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Youtube background play being a paid feature is so brazen. Google are disabling a basic UX feature in their OS and then letting you pay for it in one app that they control.

This is somewhat true, and frustrates me to no end as someone who builds web video stuff. For what it's worth it's only somewhat true. If you exit the browser while video is playing, the video is paused. If you then go to the Media Notification that Chrome added for the video and hit play, it will continue playing in the background.

The same is true on iOS, but using the media center instead of the media notification, in which case it will work.

On Android native apps this isn't really true at all, but you should use a background service to handle playback to avoid getting killed by the OS on low memory situations. This does not work for YouTube on the web, because they simply use the web visibility API to stop you from resuming the video if you try, unless you have premium.

My understanding was that ads pay to be viewed, they can't get paid if you have it on background play and not watching. So they made it a premium feature and get paid by the subscription.

YouTube premium is ridiculously janky for the price. I’ve gotten ads in weird, new parts of the app multiple times as they’re experimenting with new strategies. Like while scrolling shorts for example.

I didnt see ads on my main account, but a few times they played ads on my kids profiles on Chromecast, which was puzzling.

Yes this is perplexing. I have asked YouTube reps point blank about this but have never received any useful answer. As far as I can tell, it seems to be because the members only stuff uses the same system as YouTube's paid video rentals/purchasing system. If you rent a video on YouTube (or if you own one) you'll note that the behavior is the exact same: it acts as if you don't pay for YouTube Premium.

My guess is that the original "YouTube Sponsors" feature (which is now "YouTube Memberships") was built on top of the video rental/purchase system and now it is too hairy / not worth it to fix it in the eyes of the YouTube product managers.

I really wish they'd fix it.

Man I don't do rentals but I'd be pissed if I did and background play didn't work considering how much I've paid for premium over the years.

Agreed, but I imagine this might be a licensing restriction or something.

I think that's why the merged google music into youtube for youtube music, I imagine they had much better licensing terms on the youtube side.

If you can, install an old version of Firefox, and that allows you continue playing the YouTube video, with screen off, etc. (For example 68 esr)

Or install the latest Firefox with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro... (also available on Android)

...or use an up-to-date version with this recommended extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro...

...or use NewPipe instead:

https://newpipe.net/

(also available with SponsorBlock integration)

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