The breadth of the YouTube experience spans a number of clients across the web, TVs, OTT systems, smart displays, and mobile. But if you're one of the 80 million customers who subscribe to YouTube Premium, pretty much all of its features require you to be on its site or mobile apps. Even then, some features will be available on one platform and not the others. Today, the Google-owned property is taking steps to achieve benefit parity across your devices.
Users have long been able to set up a queue of videos to watch on TV and, more recently, on the web. But if you're on Android or iOS, you've been missing out or just stuck on playlists. Now, Premium subscribers will be able to set up queues on their phones and tablets.
If your consumption of YouTube is piling up to the point where you need to change devices to finish watching a video, Premium has been rolling out a feature called "Continue watching." When you open up YouTube on your next device, the site or app will show the video you were previously watching at the bottom of the screen. You can press play on that box to continue said video from where you left off. This feature has been intermittently available for those going from the mobile apps to the website in the past couple of years, but users haven't been able to go in the reverse direction until a few weeks ago.
For those on the Apple side of the mobile divide, members will be able to watch YouTube videos together with their FaceTime cohorts through SharePlay in the coming weeks. This expands upon a similar watch party ability delivered through Google Meet that debuted this past September.
YouTube also officially acknowledges on its corporate blog that it is trying out a high-bitrate 1080p viewing option on iOS now and will have an experiment for web users soon. Smart downloads, brought from YouTube Music to the main YouTube platform last year, gets an honorable mention.