Today, YouTube introduced a new version of its premium service called Premium Lite. YouTube Premium has been around for a long time offering ad-free video viewing, downloads, and the ability to listen in the background for $13.99/month in the U.S.
Source: YouTube.
With Lite, YouTube is offering a more affordable version of Premium for $7.99/month. The new tier will still include ads for music and music videos and it won’t let you download videos or play them in the background; however, other video categories will be ad-free.
It’s good to see YouTube offer something at a lower price point. YouTube Premium’s price has crept up in recent years, and the features that Lite leaves behind seem like natural break points in the service. For some users, YouTube is music, in which case, they’ll want the full Premium plan to avoid ads. For others like me, who use YouTube occasionally for music, $7.99 is a significantly better deal, though I’d prefer if background play was part of Lite, too.
MacStories’ video rollout on YouTube continues today with MacStories Unwind, the podcast where Federico and I swap funny stories about the differences between life in the U.S. and Italy and share media picks and deals. The show is released every Friday, just in time to enjoy a good story and unwind with one of our media picks, and now, you can watch as well as listen.
As with our other shows, there will always be an audio version of MacStories Unwind. The video version is there for those who prefer to get their podcasts from YouTube, and judging from our other shows, that’s a lot of you. But if video isn’t your thing, you won’t notice any difference in the audio version.
I should also mention that we offer an early, ad-free version of the show, which we call MacStories Unwind+, for all Club MacStories members. The plus version of the show comes out on Thursday afternoons U.S. time as one of the many Club perks we offer. It’s a great way to get a jump on your weekend plans by getting our media recommendations a day early and enjoying the other perks of the Club.
You can learn more about Club MacStories and the perks we offer, like weekly and monthly newsletters, podcast perks, special columns, a Discord community, and more, by visiting the Club Plans page. More than ever before, Club MacStories is what sustains MacStories. We’d love it if you’d join.
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
Walz was inspired by Ben Wallace to build a website around the videos after Wallace wrote about discovering these videos. Walz found over 5 million videos with the IMG_XXX title on YouTube, which now feed into the IMG_XXXX website where they can be randomly played.
When you need a break, visit Walz’s site and watch a few videos. Filmed with early iPhones and iPod Touches, the quality isn’t great, but there’s something about these snippets of everyday life that someone decided to upload that is mesmerizing to watch. Projects like this are what make the open web great.
Today, we’re expanding our podcast AppStories to include video on YouTube. AppStories debuted in 2017, and with over 400 episodes recorded, it’s long past due for a video version.
Today’s episode was a great place to start because Federico and I discussed his iPad mini review, and in the video version, he was able to show off the hardware in a way that isn’t possible in the audio-only version.
It’s safe to say that bringing AppStories to YouTube is a good sign that our YouTube channel has graduated from an experiment to a full-fledged component of MacStories. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, you can check it out and subscribe here.
It’s not a conventional YouTube channel by any stretch, and as I recently discussed with Robb on Ruminate, it’s not meant to be. The purpose of the channel is to reach podcast listeners we wouldn’t have otherwise, enhance the experience for listeners of our shows, and add a new dimension to what we do on MacStories.net – and soon, Club MacStories – which it has accomplished more and more with each passing week.
If you’re curious about AppStories on YouTube, you can subscribe to just the show or the whole channel, which also includes
the video versions of Comfort Zone and NPC: Next Portable Console;
podcast bonus material for NPC;
audio versions of Ruminate, Magic Rays of Light, and MacStories Unwind;
playlists of classic AppStories episodes; and
a growing collection of MacStories videos.
It should go without saying that the audio versions of our podcasts aren’t going anywhere, but I always hear concerns that the video version of a show will wreck the audio-only version. It won’t. AppStories in particular has been an audio-first podcast for seven years, so that’s not changing; but if you want to watch AppStories, now you can.
Thanks to everyone who has subscribed to the MacStories YouTube channel and tried our podcasts there. If you haven’t checked out the channel in a while, stop by sometime. It’s changed a lot since we launched it in June, and we’re not finished building it out yet. We have plenty of plans yet to come, including a little bonus for Club members later this week.
We’ve begun publishing more than podcasts on YouTube. In addition to MacStories’ six podcasts, we’ve added bonus content for NPC: Next Portable Console listeners. Whether you watch the video version of the show or not, we kicked off a playlist of bonus content this week with two videos.
The first is an unboxing and closer look at the Nintendo Switch Lite Hyrule Edition. I’ve had the Switch Lite for a little over a week and love it.
YouTube’s playlist feature is also a great way to put together themed sets of past episodes of shows like AppStories, which has over 400 episodes. We’re working on more of these, but this week, we added a playlist of all 43 interview episodes we’ve done so far, as well as a collection of our classic Pick 2 episodes where Federico and I spotlight recent apps we’ve been trying.
Today, we’re expanding NPC: Next Portable Console to include video on YouTube. The reception to the show has been fantastic. NPC debuted in the top five on the Apple Podcasts Video Game chart and has been attracting more listeners every week as an audio-only podcast on YouTube. However, with videogames being such a popular category on YouTube, we knew we could do more for listeners by adding a proper video version of the show.
Today’s episode was the perfect place to start with video. I don’t want to give away Federico’s surprises here, but he plotted a big reveal for months that he springs on Brendon and me in today’s episode. It’s a deep dive into the console modding community and a classic Federico reveal. As always, we highlight the latest portable gaming news, too.
Thanks to everyone who has listened to NPC and our other new shows these past few months. It means a lot to us. Our ongoing experiments with YouTube are a direct result of the enthusiasm for the shows and something we plan to do more of in the coming months.
Comfort Zone is a weekly podcast about trying new things. Every Thursday, co-hosts Matt Birchler, Niléane Dorffer, and Christopher Lawley challenge themselves and each other to try something new in their tech lives whether it’s hardware, an app, a workflow, an automation, or something else. It’s a fun way to explore the tech world with the show’s hosts.
But Comfort Zone isn’t just a new podcast at MacStories. It’s also our first podcast on our new YouTube channel. The first episode, which has its own playlist on the channel and is embedded below, is out today.
Of course, you can also subscribe to the audio-only version of the show too. Links to subscribe to the audio version in Apple Podcasts, popular podcast players, and the show’s RSS feed are all available on MacStories.
It’s great to have Comfort Zone on the MacStories YouTube channel. This is a new experiment for us, but with the early enthusiasm for the video version of the show, I expect Comfort Zone is just the start of more to come from MacStories. So, be sure to check out episode 1 of the Comfort Zone on YouTube, subscribe to our channel, and let us know what you think.
John covered Juno, Christian Selig’s new YouTube client for visionOS, on MacStories last week, and I’ve been using the app for the past few days as my default way of watching YouTube videos on my Vision Pro. Today, Selig released version 1.1 of Juno with some welcome quality-of-life enhancements such as the ability to choose video quality, faster load times, and support for dropping YouTube links in the app to watch them directly in Juno. You can read more about the changes on Selig’s blog.
The one new feature I want to call out here is the addition of URL schemes which have, once again, come to the rescue to help me navigate the early limitations of a new Apple platform.
Leading up to the release of Apple Vision Pro, there was as much, or perhaps more, talk about which apps wouldn’t be on the platform on day one as there was about which would. To be sure, there are some very notable holes in the Vision Pro’s catalog, and one of the biggest is YouTube. However, as we’ll see over and over with the Vision Pro apps we’ll be covering at MacStories, the gap isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think, thanks to developers like Christian Selig, the former maker of the Reddit client Apollo and his brand new app, Juno.
