Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
I’ve been subscribed to YouTube Premium for many years now, and yet I didn’t know what I was exactly paying for. In my mind, I always associated Premium with an ad-free experience; being able to get rid of all those pesky long and interrupting ads before or while watching a video is alone worth the price. Adding the family benefits for my husband, and the fact that this works everywhere, including on our TVs, makes it more of a no-brainer.
Even though I don’t use them often, I also knew that Premium gave me the option for background play, picture-in-picture, and YouTube Music Premium — all perks that many of our Android Authority readers seem to love.
What I didn’t know, though, was that Premium packs some smaller but very useful advantages and features throughout the experience. And those… well, those, I’ve been relying on for years, and I had no idea they weren’t available for free watchers. I had taken them for granted, and it was only when I used YouTube on a secondary free account that I noticed they were missing.
The extremely handy ‘Continue watching’
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
It’s been a couple of years since YouTube introduced ‘Continue watching,’ a feature I never thought I used that often until I didn’t have it anymore on my secondary account. What this does is essentially pick up the video I was watching on one device and offer the suggestion to continue it on the second. So if I’m checking out our hands-on with the Nothing Phone 3 on my desktop and I step away for a bit, I can open YouTube on my phone to find the video already there on the bottom right, queued up for me.
I didn't know I used 'Continue watching' this much, until I switched to an account that doesn't have it.
This works across phones, web, and TV, and saves me time having to dig into my watch history or search to find that video I was just watching. It also feels freeing in a way, because I know I don’t have to stay in front of my TV or computer to finish watching a video; I can pick it up where I left off on my phone.
When I used my free YouTube account, this option wasn’t there. I immediately noticed that YouTube wasn’t offering my paused video as the first suggestion to watch, and I thought it was a bug or a setting I hadn’t enabled, but after looking into it, I realized it was only available for YouTube Premium subscribers. This is what sent me into this rabbit hole, looking for other similarly niche but practical Premium-only features.
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