It’s such a great feature, and I see why YouTube gates it to Premium.

Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.

It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.

In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.

When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.

Try watching YouTube without logging in through a VPN with an ad blocker. You get 5s black screens and "Experiencing Interruptions?" popups.

If they don't want people watching videos without logging in, they should gate them behind a login screen rather than fucking with their users.