Since 2015, the official alternative to enjoy a YouTube without ads has been the subscription Premium. This changed last year with the deployment in numerous markets of YouTube Litea more economical plan than the previous one and that in Spain can be contracted since last September. Also more limited, so much so that in reality it only offers one of the four benefits of the Premium subscription and not even completely. The thing must not have convinced users too much, so the platform has decided give Lite a complete turn and bring it quite close to Premium, without touching the price that remains at €7.99 per month.
Until now, what a YouTube Lite subscriber gained was being able to watch ‘most videos, no ads’. The small print of Google indicates that advertising may still appear ‘in musical content, in Shorts and when you search or browse’so depending on the type of content you consume on YouTube it may or may not be worth it. In any case, it is not something that cannot be achieved using a browser with a native ad blocker such as brave.
In contrast, YouTube Premium, €13.99 per monthcompletely eliminates advertising, gives access to YouTube Music without ads, allows playback in the background and downloads videos to be able to watch them offline. These last two functions are the ones that YouTube Lite now gains without any changes in the cost of the subscription that maintains its €7.99 monthly or €95.88 per year.
The company explains, in a post on its blog, ‘having received feedback regarding the inclusion of these additional features in the service’. Background playback and downloads are implemented starting this Tuesday and They will be available in all markets where Premium Lite is found ‘in the coming weeks’.
Thus YouTube Lite gains interest and possibly new subscribers for the video platform while YouTube Premium, a 57% more expensive, you lose it. Despite the time that this subscription, which began in tests under the name Music Key At the end of 2014, it was renamed the following year to YouTube Network and then YouTube Premium, has achieved very low penetration in its more than a decade of existence. According to Google data from 2025, they are 125 million of subscribed users, which leaves a percentage of a 4.63% from among the estimated 2.7 billion total users.
This announcement follows the restrictions that Google established at the beginning of the month to prevent users from using alternative means to use background playback without having to pay €167.88 per year from YouTube Premium. It was then learned that the company had begun to block this capability in browsers that allow it as Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet either brave.
‘Background playback is an exclusive feature for YouTube Premium members. While some non-Premium users were previously able to access it through mobile web browsers in certain situations, We’ve updated the experience to ensure consistency across all our platforms‘, the company then told Android Authority.
However, as in the case of browser extensions that block advertising and which Google periodically blocks Chromethis is a game of cat and mouse. In Brave, for example, background playback now works again.