Premium also generously allows you to turn off the screen while listening.

Yeah, seeing that recently was a good reminder that my phone is not under my control.

The war on general purpose computing is strong. The RIAA has been at the forefront of restricting & preventing user freedoms since time immemorial.

Only this time, unlike with Betamax[1], they are winning. Backed by anti-circumvention laws like the DMCA section 1201, which makes any lock, no matter how poorly built, a criminal violation to break or even to build or discuss ways of breaking.

[1] https://consumerist.com/2014/01/17/on-this-day-in-1984-the-s...

> The war on general purpose computing is strong.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24866279.

Hint: if on Android, Firefox will allow you to do that anyway, even allowing you to do other things on your phone with YT playing in the background. And with uBlock, you won't even get ads.

> Premium also generously allows you to turn off the screen while listening.

As does telling your browser to display the desktop site instead.

Does it permit it 100% of the time, or do you pay to discover that there’s a bunch of exceptions?

And I guess once you stop paying, it’s all gone?

>discover that there’s a bunch of exceptions?

Periodically the downloaded videos become unavailable offline if you don't have an internet connection to refresh them. Maybe once a month or something. Which means you can't hold on to a video through their service indefinitely.

Wait, how does that even work?

The downloaded videos likely have time constraint applied to them that can be updated when the app connects to the Internet. I don't think the downloaded videos can be played outside of the app.

Oh, it’s app only? That would already be a pain. I think they got into a good groove of saving URLs for later downloading. Needing to load each one on a tablet is ruining the automation of them visiting a friend or sitting in a cafe, socializing and downing a few dozen gb via youtube-dl just hitting a list of URLs in the bg.

There are no exceptions except for things like paid TV shows (not clips, actual TV shows and movies you can pay for[0]) - you can download any video and, as said in the sibling comment, it only expires after 30 days of being offline.

0: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9679194?hl=en

I don't understand the concept of "expiration" for an actual file that you have downloaded. How does it work, technically?

The download expires in the app. You don’t get a download button on YouTube.com with premium.

So the app deletes the file after expiration. But what if you copy the file elsewhere?

The "normal" app yes, but there is another one called Youtube Go, which you can download and save the video on your phone, IDK if it´s avaliable worldwide.

It's available to everyone with a Google account, but not for all videos.