YouTube Premium gets 5 handy new features, including faster playback and higher-quality audio

• These YouTube Premium features are coming to more users
• They cover playback speeds, audio quality, and smart downloads
• YouTube has just revamped its experimental features page

If you've been weighing up whether or not YouTube Premium is worth the subscription fee, you now get five more features for your money. These features have previously been available as tests or on a limited selection of devices, and are now rolling out more widely.

The new features are outlined in an official YouTube Help forum post (via 9to5Google). First up is the ability to ramp up playback speeds to a pacy 4x, which is double the maximum 2x speed that regular YouTube users get. This is now fully available across Android, iOS, and the web.

Then there's higher-quality audio, which ramps up tunes to 256kbps on videos officially labeled as music tracks. This has already been available through YouTube Music, but is now an option in YouTube for Android and iOS too.

Next is Jump Ahead, which lets you quickly skip to the most-viewed sections of a video (in theory cutting out the less interesting parts). YouTube Premium subscribers have previously had access to this on the desktop and on mobile, and the feature is now being pushed out to the YouTube apps for smart TVs and gaming consoles as well.

YouTube Shorts features

The other two features we need to cover are for YouTube Shorts. Smart downloads for Shorts – where the YouTube app will automatically download recommended clips for watching while you're offline – has previously been available on Android and been tested on iOS, and is now coming to all iPhone users.

It's the same scenario for the final feature: picture-in-picture mode for YouTube Shorts. You could previously get this on Android and by opting in to test it on iOS, but it's now an official part of the YouTube app for iOS.

While these aren't huge upgrades, they're all useful in their own way, and YouTube Premium subscribers will be glad to see more feature parity across multiple devices. These features add to everything you already get, including ad-free viewing, video downloads, and YouTube Music Premium.

Some of these features are being upgraded from opt-in experiments at the same time as YouTube is revamping its YouTube Labs offering, which now appears to have a new name and a new focus on AI features.

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