YouTube testing 1080p “premium” streaming quality

3 years ago 1

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Popular video sharing platform YouTube has started testing a higher-quality Full HD (1080p) streaming setting.

Several users who subscribe to the service’s Premium plan have started seeing a “1080p Premium” option alongside the typical quality settings.

A note under the setting explained it featured an “enhanced” bitrate.

Bitrate refers to the amount of data that is loaded or delivered every second in a video or audio file.

While resolution is one of the major factors that influences the image quality of videos, video bitrate is also very important.

Videos with higher bitrates contain more data, so their image is sharper and more detailed.

Video streaming services have to finely-tune bitrate settings to balance the quality viewers get with the capabilities of users’ networks and their own infrastructure.

Higher bitrates not only require greater bandwidth on the customer’s side, but also more storage and network capacity on the infrastructure that hosts and delivers the content.

While YouTube is still offering its conventional 1080p setting, one Redditor claimed that it had recently downgraded the setting.

That would suggest the 1080p premium option could be a way to get more users to sign up to YouTube Premium.

But several other users said that YouTube’s 1080p had been losing bitrate quality over several years.

“It’s known that bitrates on YouTube has been falling since it’s inception basically,” one user said.

“This was bound to happen one way or another as storing (and serving) high resolution + high framerate + high bitrate content is exponentially more expensive than just high res + high framerate.”

Another said that 1080p on YouTube always looked “atrociously bad”, to such an extent that gameplay channels uploaded 1080p videos as 1440p or 4K to get the enhanced bitrate presets available with those resolution options.