YouTube’s Premium Family plan offers a nifty way of extending the joy of a paid subscription to others in your family, all while not breaking the bank. The $23/mo subscription allows you to add up to five family members to share your Premium subscription (including YouTube Music) with, albeit with some restrictions.
Since 2023, at the very least, YouTube has required all family plan members to be located in the same household. Although the stipulation has long been in place, YouTube has never really gone out of its way to enforce it. That seems to be changing now.
This comes soon after YouTube started testing out a new two-person Premium plan.
The streaming giant is now seemingly flagging accounts that are part of a family plan but not physically located in the same household as the family manager. A friend of mine, who’s also an Android Police reader, received one such email titled “Your YouTube Premium family membership will be paused.”
“Your YouTube Premium family membership requires all members to be in the same household as the family manager. It appears you may not be in the same household as your family manager, and your membership will be paused in 14 days. Once your access is paused, you will remain in your family group and be able to watch YouTube with ads, but will no longer have YouTube Premium benefits,” reads the email.
For context, YouTube conducts an “electronic check-in” every 30 days to ensure that each family member lives at the same residential address as the family manager. Previously, failing the check-in didn’t really seem to have any consequences, but that is now changing.
The crackdown doesn’t seem widespread just yet
Once flagged, users will retain their family member status, albeit with none of the YouTube Premium benefits. Additionally, flagged users will have the option to contact Google to “confirm eligibility and maintain access” via a support form.
For what it’s worth, I, too, am part of a family plan where the plan manager lives in a different household, and I haven’t received an email like the one above yet (fingers crossed, even though I just self-snitched). As of right now, the crackdown doesn’t seem to have made its way out widely. There have been scattered reports of it on Reddit since a few months ago, with the only concrete one being user thisTja’s post who had their membership canceled after the 14-day warning.
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