These days, you can’t watch anything on a free YouTube account without being interrupted 27 times by the same Eugene Levy car commercial. For those of us who would rather endure that than pay $11.99 per month for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads, YouTube is testing an interesting alternative in parts of Europe.
First spotted on ResetEra and confirmed by The Verge, there’s a new, cheaper version of Premium called YouTube Premium Lite that select users in places like Finland, Norway, and Luxembourg can test out. It cuts the monthly European price of Premium nearly in half, from €11.99 to €6.99, and rids subscribers of advertising. The only problem is that it doesn’t do anything else.
A full Premium subscription offers not only an ad-free viewing experience, but also offline downloads, YouTube Music perks, and the ability to keep a YouTube video playing in the background while another app is open. To echo an important point made by The Verge, Premium Lite cuts out almost all of the Premium perks with only a 40 percent reduction in price. If this service makes its way to the U.S. with the same price drop, it might not be an especially great value.
Considering it’s still in limited regional testing, however, that’s a big “if.” Premium Lite might never come out at all, or it might come out with a couple extra features or a cheaper price. At the very least, it’s good that YouTube is looking at different ways to free us from the clutches of terrible commercials.
