Finally, You Can Listen to YouTube TV — Even if Your Phone Screen Is Locked

The biggest feature YouTube TV has rolled out in a long time has almost nothing to do with video. For today at least, audio is king.

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YouTube TV is “running an experiment” that enables its playback — video and the accompanying audio — to continue after a user’s phone or tablet screen is locked, a spokesperson told IndieWire. The experimental feature is available for Android and iOS mobile users.

A website called 9to5Google first reported Reddit users commenting on their discovery of the feature. Background playback has been rolling out in pockets for about a week now — your access may be yet to come.

“If a viewer has the YouTube TV app on and then goes to lock their phone, playback will continue,” the spokesperson said. “If users want to avoid background playback, they can pause the video before locking their phone.”

You may be thinking: Why would I want to do that? Background playback may sound like a pretty minor convenience (or even a minor annoyance), but try telling that to anybody who listens to podcasts via YouTube, watches music videos on the platform, or can get by with just the audio guidance from instructional videos while their hands are covered in grease — or worse. (It can get so much worse.)

There’s a difference though between YouTube TV and plain old YouTube . The background-playback feature has actually been available for a while on the regular UGC-focused YouTube app — you just have to pay for the privilege. UGC stands for user generated content. It is the hallmark of YouTube and TikTok that allows the platforms to amass huge libraries of content at no cost to them beyond an advertising-revenue split.

YouTube Premium, which already includes the feature, costs $13.99 per month for an individual or $22.99 for a family of up to five users. “Background playback” is one of four major features differentiating free-to-use YouTube and its upsold version (though it was once available widely for free). The other major perks are that YouTube Premium is also ad free, it includes access to YouTube Music Premium, and its users gain the ability to download videos for offline viewing.

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YouTube TV is different — and it’s a lot more expensive. YouTube TV, which has its own app, is a vMVPD (a virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor), a cord-cutter’s alternative to a traditional cable bundle. And it’s the biggest: Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, Fubo, and cable- and satellite-TV providers are all quite a bit behind.

YouTube TV users get access to 100-plus linear channels: Live sports, news, and whatever else is scheduled on broadcast and cable television. YouTube TV costs nearly $100 per month after a discounted four-month promo period. For that money, you would think you could throw your phone in a lake and still hear what the “House Hunters” couple is griping about this time.

Again here, uninterrupted access to the audio is still valuable even if the video component cannot be concurrently viewed. From the content side, newscasts, sports talk (fantasy, betting), live sports (YouTube TV is now the home to NFL Sunday Ticket — as an add-on), and talk shows are the most format-friendly for the feature. And hey, Court TV (available on YouTube TV!) is probably pretty jazzed — if you can find it. (We’d include MTV here but the actual music television days are way behind us.)

The YouTube platform is dominant in viewership as well as advertising revenue (the two of course go hand in hand). In July, YouTube unseated Disney — the entirety of Disney — to become the most-watched media company in America, according to the TV ratings company Nielsen. The victory wouldn’t last long, but really only because a third competitor, NBCUniversal, temporarily kicked down the door with the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Though we won’t get Nielsen’s The Gauge report measuring TV usage for September for a few weeks, we can already spoil the news: YouTube will almost certainly be back on top.