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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• YouTube Premium removes ads and bundles in YouTube Music
• Long-form videos don’t work well with ads
• Downloading videos can be problematic when you’re a phone reviewer

As a tech writer, I use YouTube as a regular part of my job. I also occasionally listen to some music while I work. Put those things together, and it turns out that YouTube Premium is a wonderful choice for me. 

YouTube Premium costs $13.99 per month for individuals (or $139.99 annually), $7.99 for students, and $22.99 for families with up to six users. The latter is the plan I subscribe to, and I share it with my wife and two kids.

Also: YouTube Premium cost me 30% extra for months until I noticed – check your plan ASAP

YouTube Premium gives you a number of benefits, like removal of ads, offline viewing — though there’s a glitch in that mechanism I’ll discuss later — and the ability to continue playing music and movies even when your device’s screen is off. 

There are other benefits, too, like stopping a video on one device and picking it up on another, enhanced audio and video quality, Picture-in-Picture viewing (YouTube in a small floating window), and more.

YouTube is not built for ads (even if it’s free)

Personally, just getting rid of ads is enough for me, and there’s a specific reason for that. Most of the YouTube videos that I watch are created as one long, continuous piece of content. Ads breaking into that content are jarring on the best of days. And with YouTube’s uptick in unskippable 30-second ads, it’s becoming increasingly difficult not to feel they’re diminishing the platform’s overall quality.

I don’t subscribe to any other ad-free services; all of my other streaming services include ads. That’s because I mostly watch TV programs on those services, which are already broken up into segments for broadcast TV. Breaking up movies — which is really annoying, by the way — and breaking up long-form YouTube videos is too disjointed an experience.

Speaking of which, while this isn’t a YouTube Premium exclusive, if you haven’t checked out YouTube’s free movie selection, go right now. It’s just banger after banger. You’ll thank me later.

Also: There’s an easy way to skip YouTube’s new unskippable ads, but you may not like it

But the other reason I love YouTube Premium is because it includes YouTube Music in the package. That’s basically like getting Spotify for free, along with removing ads. 

Of course, my family would disagree with that point. My wife and daughter both use Spotify (free, with ads), despite the fact that they both have access to YouTube Music. I may delve into that phenomenon in another feature, but for now, it’s a bit confounding.

There’s just one problem (for me)

One speed bump that I run into almost every year is the fact that YouTube Premium members are only allowed to download videos onto 10 devices at a time. If you run into that cap, the service will automatically swap out your oldest device up to four times. After that, you are forever locked to those 10 devices. 

Well, that’s fine, right? Surely a normal person won’t have more than two phones, a couple of tablets, and maybe a few TVs, right?

I review phones for a living. You can probably see where this is going.

Also: YouTube Premium vs. YouTube Premium Lite: Are the upgrades worth the $6 difference?

So, once per year, I can email customer support, patiently explain what I do for a living, and get told that it will reset my devices as a one-time courtesy. It’s a stupid problem to have; I get it. But I have it all the same.

But overall, YouTube Premium is an absolute no-brainer for me. I’m smitten with it. YouTube Music works pretty well for me, though the algorithm has bad days like anyone else from time to time. But the real killer feature is removing ads on videos that were never designed to have them in the first place. That’s why I will keep coming back every time.