YouTube Is Cracking Down on Sharing Premium Family Accounts Outside Your ‘Household’

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YouTube Is Cracking Down on Sharing Premium Family Accounts Outside Your ‘Household’

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If you watch enough YouTube, you might consider paying for YouTube Premium. With it, you get to watch videos ad-free, download content for offline playback, and access YouTube Music Premium—though there are ways to bypass ads and download videos without it. While the standard sub is $13.99, families can upgrade to Premium Family for $22.99 per month, which supports up to six accounts on one plan—but you're going to want to make sure those accounts all belong to people who live in your house.

That's not necessarily anything new. According to Android Police, since 2023, YouTube's policy regarding its Premium Family plan is that all accounts need to be a part of the same "household." That means that all users need to live in the same house as the account holder. However, it's a policy that YouTube hasn't enforced. As such, account holders have been able to add up to five other members to their Premium Family plans, regardless of where those users live.

That's now changing. Android Police reports that YouTube is now cracking down on Premium Family accounts that allow users from outside the household. In fact, YouTube is reaching out to users who have joined a Family Plan that belongs to someone they do not live with. The message reads as follows:

"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."

YouTube doesn't appear to be rolling out widespread enforcement at this time, though it gives us a glimpse at how they're handling it. Once they find that your account is out of compliance, they'll give you two weeks of use, before pausing your membership. They won't kick you out of your family group, nor will they stop your ability to watch YouTube, but you'll lose all Premium benefits, including ad-free videos, downloads, and YouTube Music Premium.

Can you get around this YouTube Premium Family crackdown?

Like other services with these types of restrictions, YouTube runs a monthly "check-in" to confirm that users live in the same house as the account holder. Every 30 days, the service will make sure you're streaming from the same location. In theory, that should give you an opportunity to trick YouTube's check-in system, but in practice, it might be more complicated.

See, with services like Netflix, this monthly check-in isn't necessarily automated. Instead, you simply need to access your account from the household once a month to be in compliance. So for September, you could take your iPad or laptop to the account owner's house, stream a bit, and be set until October.

With YouTube Premium, however, it seems the check-in happens on its own. It might not be enough to simply stream from the household every 30 days: If the system sees you out of the household for these check-ins, it might flag your account.

YouTube doesn't go into a ton of detail into how these check-ins actually work, so there's no harm in streaming from the account owner's house to see if that keeps you in compliance. 

Source: YouTube Is Cracking Down on Sharing Premium Family Accounts Outside Your ‘Household’