COVER FEATURE

FREE AT LAST!

Prices seem to be rising everywhere and the golden age of online freebies has passed, but if you look carefully you can still find goodies you previously had to pay for. Daniel Booth reveals what’s become free this year…

We think you can break the internet era into three rough phases. First, for a few years in the mid-to-late 1990s, it seemed that most online content would always be free. That utopian vision didn’t last long as media companies and the early tech giants quickly realised how much money could be made.

Thus began the second period, where companies often launched paid-for services, only to later make them free to attract more customers as they developed other money-making schemes. This lasted many years and gave us loads of superb free software and services, but it started to fade around 2018-19, led by TV-streaming firms seeking to maximise their profits.

Then came the Covid lockdowns and increased public reliance on digital services. As inflation soared, companies started to squeeze customers for every penny they could get – charging to avoid ads, share passwords, work across multiple devices and so on.

We’re firmly stuck in this third phase, but there are hopeful signs. AI companies urgently need to grab users and are racing to make paid-for tools free for everyone. Feeling threatened, older firms have made apps and advanced options free.

We present the evidence here, with the 20 best programs, apps, films, TV shows and more that have become free in the past 12 months. It’s not quite a new golden age, but at least some companies are giving something back instead of dreaming up yet another way to fleece you. You’ll see how much money we saved on page 57.

VIDEO, MUSIC & PODCASTS

1 Edit iPhone videos on Adobe Premiere

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Adobe’s new Premiere mobile app brings proper video editing to your iPhone for free. Features that used to cost $9.99 (around £7.40) a month in the now-discontinued Premiere Rush – such as multi-track timelines (see screenshot below); 4K HDR exports; unlimited video and audio layers; and royalty-free stock clips – are now included.

Not everything is free – you’ll need to pay to go beyond 2GB storage, or to use Adobe’s Firefly AI tool to generate images, create sound effects and more. However, you don’t need to pay to remove adverts because… there are no adverts! Watch Adobe’s video for help using it: www.snipca.com/56483. An Android version is coming soon.

Adobe’s Premiere app offers plenty of advanced video-editing tools, including multi-track editing

2 Download videos from YouTube

You can now download videos for free in YouTube’s app, but only in Low and Medium qualityYou can now

www.youtube.com

You can now download videos from YouTube’s app to watch later offline, but only in Low (144p) and Medium (360p) video quality.

To watch offline in High (720p) or Full HD (1080p) you’ll still need a YouTube Premium subscription (£12.99 a month). Also, you can’t You can now download videos for free in YouTube’s app, but only in Low and Medium quality download music videos for free in any quality. Still, it’s better than nothing.

3 Edit videos on Google Vids

Click File then ‘New video’ to create videos using Google Vids

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In August, Google released its video-editing tool Vids for everyone to use, having previously restricted it to Workspace subscribers (from £5.09 a month). It looks similar to Google Slides, and offers over a hundred templates and transitions. You can add images, stock media, audio, objects and more, with the ability to customise transitions.