YouTube Premium Family Plans for Legacy G-Suite users

[kpkuk]

Recently, Google kindly allowed personal/family G-Suite accounts to continue with their custom domains without charge. I think that was the right thing to do, given the length of time some of us have had these in place.

However, what does NOT seem reasonable, is that it's not possible to sign up to a YouTube Premium Family Plan using our legacy G-Suite accounts. Now that the ONLY people who could/should be using those legacy accounts ARE personal and family users, it would make sense for those now to be allowed to subscribe to all and any of the personal plans, such as the YouTube Premium family plan.

Google - could you please pass this request on, and provide some kind of update? You're actually losing subscription money, because my only choice at present is to use other services, such as Spotify, which doesn't limit it in that way. I'd prefer to subscribe to YouTube Premium, but not if I have to buy all members of my family individual plans!

Thanks.

[larkinja]

If google is paying attention I would second this as well.  I would like to remind them that like me, some of us use a google workspace for personal use as well.  I pay google for a custom email account for each of my family using workspace.  Can't say I really understand why they wouldn't want to offer it to workspace users anyway.  

[CanadaRed]

What I would like to see is workspace offering an add-on for premium youtube (add free) and youtube music.  I understand that these are considered consumer products, but they are often consumed by business users during the course of business. So why not offer a workspace add-on subscription to provide it, and offer a policy under Chrome Enterprise to allow for usage tracking and content restrictions.

[_Sascha_]

Yes, YouTube Premium Family is really something I miss. But even 2024 we can't activate it as Legacy G Suite Users.

[lukasradek]

Question....

I cannot use my Google Workspace (previously Legacy G Suite) with Youtube Premium Family subscription. Is this affecting just the old converted G Suite accounts or is this a problem for fresh Workspace accounts too?

[icrew]

As I understand it, YouTube Premium Family is a consumer product that does not work with any Workspace account, regardless of origin or edition. And as far as I’m aware, Google and YouTube have never explained why they’ve made that business decision.

(My guess is that it’s probably on the YouTube side of things—YouTube runs almost completely independently of the rest of Google, so it probably wouldn’t be up to the Workspace team whether to make such a feature available for purchase.)

[KAM]

@icrew that is my understanding as well however I've been told it's the Terms and Conditions and the limitations on use of data under Workspace that is not consistent with the way Youtube works. -KAM

[lukasradek]

Well, I am quite sure, that they are technically capable of allowing Family plans for Workspace users 😀... because even though it sort of semanticaly contradicts (consumer vs business), in practice, many people (including me) have a Workspace profile to have a custom domain for personal use.

Anyway... my question came from the standpoint that my then-legacy-G-suite was actually unable to do something that current Workspace accounts can. I have forgotten what it is, though I think that it was solved by manual correction from Google support.

So that was basically my question... whether contacting support could possibly solve this Family plan issue for me. (Presuming it is a legacy G suite account bug and not a general Workspace thing.)

[loundy_mark]

There's no way for us to know. Yours sounds like an edge case. I would suspect that Google has drawn a line between business accounts and consumer accounts/products.

[icrew]

Google has made it pretty clear (through actions, not official statements) that they’re not interested in the prosumer/family plan market in terms of Workspace.

Personally, I think that’s a stupid decision on their part, but it’s been years and there hasn’t been any movement on Google’s part to change that set of decisions. Sigh/shrug….

[lukasradek]

Alright, so it is an Workspace issue... not just mine potentially flawed then-G-suite account 🙂.