Tim
For streaming accounts on various platforms, having a “family” can be a complicated mess. Yes, you can ultimately save money by having a family plan if you have multiple people using the same service, but then these companies set their own rules on what a family is. For YouTube and its YouTube Premium family plans, a family is defined as users that live in the same household. If you haven’t been following that rule, it appears YouTube is out to get’cha.
Giving credit to YouTube, it doesn’t seem that the company has been actively enforcing this restriction, but according to at least one user, that’s changing. Here’s an email sent out from YouTube to a user that was not adhering to the policy.
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.
Similar to how it was for YouTube TV when I was letting my mom use my account as part of a family plan, Google requires a location check to ensure everyone is in the same household. I live in Oregon and my mom lives in California, so obviously the company wasn’t heavily enforcing its own rule. But if users are now failing the location check, they may be in for a disabling of Premium benefits, which is obviously weak sauce.
We are sure that many people try to circumvent this rule. If you are one of those people, maybe prepare for the worse and start thinking of an alternative? In a different, better universe, these companies would understand that families don’t always live in the same house, but should still be entitled to the same benefits. That’s our hot take.
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