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Google might force users to pay for Premium to watch videos in 4K on YouTube
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That's going to be a very controversial change. Youtube already makes a substantial amount of money from their advertising business.
I can't see many people going for it. They'll just have 4K videos with no one watching it in 4K. If I'm not paying Netflix extra for professionally made 4K movies. I'm certainly not going to pay extra for something someone shot on their iPhone in their basement.
On mobile devices it would make very little difference but for quality monitors or TVs I could see it being beneficial. And to think, people wanted an 8k iPhone this year ha. It’s all compressed to hell and back anyway.
I usually set mine to 4K on my less-than-4K retina display anyway, just for the higher bitrate. It doesn't really make a particularly perceptible difference on some of the more modern codecs, but on some services it can be more noticeable.
1080p is still very good in terms of quality though. I'm definitely not paying YouTube just to be able to watch 4k, especially when they get enough ad revenue from me as it is.
They stopped "remembering" a 4K setting a while back, citing data throughput restrictions during Covid as an excuse. I certainly won't pay $$ to toggle each and every video back to 4K on Youtube.
I mean, didn't Google run gigabit fiber through half of the country? The fact that they are complaining about bandwidth limitations just feels cheap.
Maybe Apple should make their own YouTube. It would be nice to have a YouTube that didn't know what your internet searches are.
1- Why are you trying to watch a 4k video on a phone that can't do 4k?
2- Just like there's a way around the dislike counter, ads, etc, I'm sure there will be a way around the 4k thing even if that becomes a thing.
2- Just like there's a way around the dislike counter, ads, etc, I'm sure there will be a way around the 4k thing even if that becomes a thing.