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Honestly this is one of the best monetization schemes I can think of for YouTube. It's an advantage that doesn't take away anything for non-premium users, and i

by Timon3 3y ago

Honestly this is one of the best monetization schemes I can think of for YouTube. It's an advantage that doesn't take away anything for non-premium users, and it improves the main functionality of the service. I sincerely hope they can do more like this instead of increasing ad lengths for non-premium users!

kevincox 3y ago
It's really strange though when they offer higher resolution streams for free. So this only really helps for videos that are 1080p. In most cases watching 2k or 4k even on a 1080p monitor will result in better quality (although maybe less bandwidth efficient).
- reaperman 3y ago
  > In most cases watching 2k or 4k even on a 1080p monitor will result in better quality Completely agree and its been super annoying to me that 1080p was compressed so dang aggressively in the past few years.
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    It's been happening to 4K now too. I have some yt-dlp copies of videos that I grabbed a couple years ago. If I go and download them again today from the same video URL, the quality is worse when I compare frames from them directly to each other.
reaperman 3y ago
Eh, it's more of a boiling the frog situation. The quality for 1080p video has gone down a LOT over the past 5 years. It's hard to notice for general-purpose videos, but speciality videos (in my case, Starcraft2 replays) with non-standard content or high complexity (some slow motion videos of chaotic systems) just immediately collapse into noise. It's been nearly impossible to see invisible units in Starcraft2 replays on 1080p for a long time now, but that didn't used to be the case. YouTube has spent a lot on improving the compression algorithms to save money, and they've maintained 90% of the quality for most content, but the edge cases have seen 50%+ drop in visible quality. 4k completely fixes these problems and has very conservative (expensive) compression, but too many content creators still don't take advantage of that and produce only in 1080p. When 1080p came out on YouTube, it was much, much less compressed than it is now. So they did take it away for non-premium users. They just did it slowly over a long timescale.

by Timon3 3y ago

kevincox 3y ago

It's really strange though when they offer higher resolution streams for free. So this only really helps for videos that are 1080p. In most cases watching 2k or 4k even on a 1080p monitor will result in better quality (although maybe less bandwidth efficient).

reaperman 3y ago
> In most cases watching 2k or 4k even on a 1080p monitor will result in better quality Completely agree and its been super annoying to me that 1080p was compressed so dang aggressively in the past few years.
- SirMaster 3y ago
  It's been happening to 4K now too. I have some yt-dlp copies of videos that I grabbed a couple years ago. If I go and download them again today from the same video URL, the quality is worse when I compare frames from them directly to each other.

reaperman 3y ago

Eh, it's more of a boiling the frog situation. The quality for 1080p video has gone down a LOT over the past 5 years. It's hard to notice for general-purpose videos, but speciality videos (in my case, Starcraft2 replays) with non-standard content or high complexity (some slow motion videos of chaotic systems) just immediately collapse into noise. It's been nearly impossible to see invisible units in Starcraft2 replays on 1080p for a long time now, but that didn't used to be the case. YouTube has spent a lot on improving the compression algorithms to save money, and they've maintained 90% of the quality for most content, but the edge cases have seen 50%+ drop in visible quality. 4k completely fixes these problems and has very conservative (expensive) compression, but too many content creators still don't take advantage of that and produce only in 1080p. When 1080p came out on YouTube, it was much, much less compressed than it is now. So they did take it away for non-premium users. They just did it slowly over a long timescale.