YouTube Premium adds a 256kbps audio “experience” for music videos

YouTube It rolls out new features for paying users, starting with the ability to run more than one experience. If you’re paying for a Premium subscription, you can test beta features of the video streaming service by going to youtube.com/new. It was previously only possible to try one experience at a time, but now you can activate multiple options so you can try a few of them at once. YouTube has also added new features you can test now that you can activate more than one, including the ability to play music videos with the audio set to 256kbps. Previously, you could only listen to audio at 256 kbps YouTube Music.

Another new experimental feature is Picture-in-Picture for YouTube Shorts on iOS, so you can watch short videos while opening other apps. You can also activate Smart Downloads on iOS if you want YouTube to automatically save recommended short videos to your phone for offline viewing. Another thing YouTube is testing is a “skip forward” web view, which lets you skip to specific parts of the video. It was exclusively available on YouTube apps. Finally, you’ll soon be able to play videos faster on mobile, with expanded playback options up to 4x the speed.

If you’re in the US, note that Google is rolling out a bundle with YouTube Premium and 2TB of cloud storage with Google One, which will cost you $21.98 per month. That’s slightly less than the typical price of $24 per month combined ($10 for Google One and $14 for the individual YouTube Premium plan).