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Comment by stephen_cagle | Hacker News Reader

Wait a minute, why is mine $13.99 a month?

But agree, totally worth it if you at all value your time.

If you don't care about music or background play, and all you want is to eliminate ads, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15968883

Interesting - hadn't heard of this option before. But I see that "Premium Lite" is not available in NZ... https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=92752...

But at least you have IKEA

The whole country is rejoicing!

I still can't believe that they paywalled the ability for the video to keep playing when the screen is turned off.

Probably a business decision that's made them a lot of money, well done.

Thank goodness for ReVanced.

>I still can't believe that they paywalled the ability for the video to keep playing when the screen is turned off.

That's why I will never pay, no matter how much people glaze yt premium. I distinctly remember the day they took that simple feature away. uBlock and Vanced work fine, and it's also not hard to download to my media server for offline

I don't want to reward a company for shitty practices. What are they even doing at youtube besides changing the UI every 3 months and stuffing AI where it isn't wanted/needed.

At the bare minimum they need to enable the ability to blacklist entire channels, like I can easily do on my home setup. And ban AI videos without a label. Then they can have my $8

It's only for music where background play isn't supported for free.

Is this true? Nothing will play for me with my screen off.

No. What you describe is correct: No background play via the yt app unless you pay.

Yes YouTube Premium will play with the screen off (using the app. No idea about using a browser).

In a browser, it works even without Youtube Premium :-)

Firefox mobile, m.youtube.com, "Video Background Play Fix" browser extension.

Works for me without an extension, you just need to click play again after leaving the YouTube tab/locking the phone

So does ReVanced YouTube

On iOS I use Brave and it works fine.

Wasn't aware of this option... I'd actually switched to YT Music because the family plan for YT premium is/was pretty good. Nice to know I can bring it down in the future.

> Wait a minute, why is mine $13.99 a month?

Only the earliest google music people are still grandfathered in at the insanely low rate. The rest of us have been "upgraded" to at least $14/mo.

Damn, I just looked up how long I have been paying using https://payments.google.com/ . Looks like I've been paying for youtube music since October 2014. These grandfathered people must be really really early. :]

I started paying $7.99/month for Google Play Music in June of 2013. And it is now YouTube Premium and still $7.99/month.

Same here, joined up when GPM was in beta. Still on the $7.99/month. I really only use it for YTM, so if they ever up my price, I'll cancel and use Tidal or Deezer.

They also have a family plan that costs a bit more I think.

I've been on the family plan for a long while... was before they redid Google Music and YT Music, but it included YT ad free and Google Music, so I did that and dropped Spotify around a decade ago. I watch so much YT content, it's been worth it to keep... Though I'm glad that Rumble is there and seeing some improvements in UX, still not nearly as good as YT, but getting better.

Mostly watch via Android TV (NVidia Shield TV).

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