YouTube is giving Premium subscribers higher-quality video than everyone else

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23677141/youtube-premium-subscribers-higher-quality-video-1080p

by angst • 3 years ago

35 45 3 years ago

rektide• 3 years ago

The actual cost to them, in most cases, is just so marginal. It is a sign of an uncompetitive space when products create nearly pointless product segmentation, when it's not based in cost.

helsinki• 3 years ago

There is little reason to not pay for YouTube Premium, in my opinion. Worth every penny.

YouTube TV, on the other hand, well, I need to cancel that.

paco3346• 3 years ago

Agreed. The ability to just have all ads be non-existent on every platform is super nice.

Yes, on desktop I can use an ad blocker but that doesn't solve the app or smart tv usage.

midoridensha2• 3 years ago

For a smart TV, if it's an Android TV (or "Google TV"), you can install SmartTubeNext.

poulpy123• 3 years ago

For android app there is newpipe

kgwxd• 3 years ago

It's the most expensive streaming service subscription I have (family) but it gets 100x more use than all the others combined. I'd love to know how the fee I pay gets distributed to channels I watch though, assuming it even does.

zinekeller• 3 years ago

I forgot the source but in 2020 it was ~30% to YouTube and ~70% to creators (in watchtime proportion, if you have watched someone outside of YT partner program it will go to YouTube), but it was three years ago so I'm not sure if something have changed here.

chrsjxn• 3 years ago

I've asked a few streamers for their perspective, and the response is vague but more per view than ad impressions

I'm assuming this is mostly just because the ad revenue on youtube is pretty low

midoridensha2• 3 years ago

Does YouTube premium also block sponsor segments?

isabelc• 3 years ago

No, it doesn't block those.

Brajeshwar2• 3 years ago

Nope. There are tools to do that, such as SponsorBlock. I tried it but it calls home pretty often and sometimes does weird things to the videos's timing. I found it to be an annoyance. I think I did away with it, when it advertise something or tried to upsell something (forgotten). If it just ask me to buy it and keep quite and calls only Youtube/Google, it might have been OK.

It also is not available for all videos. Nonetheless, I've a feeling I should not rob off the creators, a lot of whom I follow are awesome, of their sponsor earnings.

amscanne• 3 years ago

Personally, I just skip them TiVo-style 90% of the time. As long as there’s nothing unskippable, it doesn’t really bother me.

milleramp• 3 years ago

YouTube TV was asking an extra 20$ per month for UHD streaming, all you got was some sparse 4K sports programming. Not to mention they couldn’t get the color space correct, looked like r709 content played through r2020 container. Any orange or brown was shifted red. I believe they lowered the cost to 10$ per month for uhd add on.

throwaway2904• 3 years ago

It would be worth it if it allowed to properly use youtube-dl for archiving purposes.

sli• 3 years ago

ytp-dl seems to work fine, and is faster than youtube-dl.

yunohn3• 3 years ago

That seems like an arbitrary requirement - no other media streaming platform allows for this. In fact, YouTube is the only one that’s even possible to reasonably use/download for free.

hammyhavoc3• 3 years ago

What content on YT do you find to be valuable? Personally I find video to be a poor method of finding and sharing information, and anything that's not information is just a thinly veiled ad. Most "reviews" aren't, and most talking heads just spout shite.

milkytron• 3 years ago

I watch PBS Newshour, Frontline documentaries, other documentaries, catch up on the weather and local news, and informative content on trains, urban design/planning, and transportation.

Yeah, reading this stuff would probably be better, and I do also read a lot. But sometimes I just want to sit back and relax while someone presents their information to me.

Brajeshwar2• 3 years ago

YouTube with Ads is akin to browsing the internet with no Adblockers. I have seen people browsing around with it and I keep hearing Jane‘s voice, “I have it how I like it.”[1]

YouTube Premium is an easy fix, and with its subsidized pricing in India, it is a steal. The family plan is less than $2.5 monthly. Unfortunately, my wife would sometimes complain, “Why am I not seeing any ads? I have it how I like it.”

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDNmyyrEZho

cricalix• 3 years ago

Damn. It's 12 EUR/month in Ireland.

rcarr2• 3 years ago

£15.99/month in rip off UK

fwlr• 3 years ago

For about a year I had a side project involving learning a lot about encoding (with ffmpeg) to cram as much resolution, quality, and detail into short videos while keeping them under 3 megabytes. Most of my source material was from YouTube so I ended up learning a lot about their bitrate, and I can guess a fair few of the compression and encoding settings they must be using (they’re not great, but that’s to be expected as they have to optimize for compatibility and compute efficiency across a ridiculous range of content). It is practically certain that it’s possible for YouTube pack more quality into the same bits, so I hope they’re offering more than just “higher bitrate with the same settings”.

One way to higher quality I found was you can represent more uncompressed data with the same number of compressed bits (so you end up with slightly less lossy compression). Another way was you can get higher subjective quality by picking the right bits to throw away (your compression is just as lossy but you’ve shifted where that loss happens into subjectively less important parts of the data). I think there might be some gotcha where these two things are actually identical in some deeper way, but it feels like they’re quite different.

The fact that they’re offering it to paying customers is hopefully the leverage needed by engineers to justify spending a bit more compute on better encoding settings.

(Another thought in this area is that since encoding is paid roughly once per video uploaded, you could have a “premium uploader” service that lets uploaders play around with some of the settings, or at least use a better quality preset. Many uploaders would pay ten bucks per video to do that, I have no doubt.)

mock-possum• 3 years ago

For $16/month, yeah right, okay.

Crosseye_Jack• 3 years ago

YouTube has regional pricing so if $16pm is too much for you, VPN into a “lower avg income” country and sign up via a browser.

ungawatkt• 3 years ago

Ha, timely, as vanced appears to have finally stopped working for me today. I dunno if there's an update or successor yet, but time to figure that out or cough up for premium I guess.

r0uv3n• 3 years ago

ReVanced is the successor. It patches your existing YouTube app. For me it still works flawlessly.

stonecharioteer• 3 years ago

I'm using revanced and have started seeing hiccups. Tha fully SmartTube in my TV still works.

hulitu• 3 years ago

According to YouTube, the new 1080p Premium option is “an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p” that’s supposed to make things look crisper, particularly with videos heavy on detail and motion.

So they agree that 1080p and UHD are only names for whatever they want to give you.

And how crisper is the new "enhanced bitrate version of 1080p" ?

lm284692• 3 years ago

So they agree that 1080p and UHD are only names for whatever they want to give you.

Bitrate is everything, you can have 8k that look worse than DVD

YouTube is giving Premium subscribers higher-quality video than everyone else

Related Stories