YouTube is rolling out new perks for paying users, starting with the ability to activate more than one experiment. If you pay for a Premium subscription, you can try out the video streaming service's experimental features by going to youtube.com/new. Previously it was only possible to try one experiment at a time, but now you can activate multiple options to try a few at a time. YouTube even added new features you can try now that you can activate more than one, including the ability to play music videos with the audio set to 256kbps. Previously, you could only listen to 256kbps audio on YouTube Music.
Another new testing feature is Picture-in-Picture for YouTube Shorts on iOS, so you can watch short videos while you have other apps open. You can also turn on Smart Downloads on iOS if you want YouTube to automatically save recommended shorts to your phone for offline viewing. Another thing YouTube is testing is “Skip Forward” for web viewing, which lets you jump to specific parts of a video. It used to be available exclusively on YouTube apps. Finally, you'll soon be able to play videos even faster on mobile devices, with expanded playback options of up to 4x the speed.
If you're in the US, keep in mind that Google is launching a bundle with YouTube Premium and 2TB of cloud storage with Google One, which will cost you $21.98 per month. That's a little less than the typical price of $24 a month combined ($10 for Google One and $14 for the individual YouTube Premium plan).
