- YouTube is experimenting with charging users for its playback speed tool, recent experiment reveals
- A Reddit user shared an image that says a YouTube Premium subscription is required to access playback speeds, although it doesn’t appear for everyone.
- If YouTube decides to lock the feature behind a subscription, it could encourage more Premium sign-ups or disable free users.
While many people subscribe to YouTube Premium, its free experience is still widely used by millions of people, including myself, but one of its best free features could soon be locked behind the Premium paywall.
Playback speed is one of the last useful free features left on the platform, but there is now evidence to reveal that YouTube has been experimenting with making it a new paid feature as part of YouTube Premium. If this is true, it will join other Premium benefits such as offline listening, ad-free viewing and background viewing, as well as the five useful new features it rolled out in September last year.
The experiment was first discovered by a user on Reddit, who shared a screenshot of a YouTube Premium pop-up that showed they had lost access to modify the video playback speed, but it doesn’t appear for everyone.
Youtube and playback speeds from r/youtube
It appears that YouTube is testing this by dividing users into two different groups: ‘Group A’ and ‘Group B’, as categorized in the Reddit thread. Users in Group A will still have access to free streaming speeds, so nothing changes, while users in Group B will encounter the pop-up window requiring them to be subscribed to YouTube Premium to use the streaming speeds.
Although it is not set in stone, we do not rule out the possibility of this happening just yet. We’ve reached out to Google and YouTube for comment and will update this story when we know more.
Opinion: What a way to drive away more free users
It just goes to show that YouTube is desperate to persuade more free users to move to the Premium side, but at what cost?
Overall, I find that most YouTube users are pretty happy with what the free experience offers. While Premium’s benefits are a game-changer, there are enough free tools without paying for another subscription service, but this potential move could be the one that pushes free users over the edge.
Playback speed is one of the last free tools that keeps me locked in, and it’s the same for many users. I love using it to speed up videos that are too long to watch at standard 1.0 speed, especially long interview videos. Fortunately, I haven’t gotten any YouTube Premium pop-ups yet and I hope it stays that way.
While this would be a huge inconvenience for us free users, I’ve always been intrigued by YouTube Premium and how much it improves the viewing experience. I can’t say I’ve ever been tempted by a free trial; I think it would be a game changer for watching music videos. Who knows, maybe this will be the year I give in.
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