News JVTech YouTube wants to charge for 1080p: here’s the price and details
YouTube is a free service that has evolved with the times. The platform recently turned 18, but the world is changing fast. If advertising revenue is clearly no longer sufficient for the platform, YouTube is trying to innovate through its paid service YouTube Premium. But this news may make you cringe.
Paid 1080p on YouTube?
YouTube is starting to test a whole new way of working. Usually, you have the choice between different quality modes:
- 144p to 480p for SD (lower quality)
- 720p for High Definition
- 1080p for Full HD
- 1440p for 2K
- 2560p for 4K
But you should know that the quality offered is not always there. Indeed, YouTube, like other sites hosting video content, offers quality compression so that Google’s servers can absorb all this content and distribute it massively. It is in this context that Google would have decided to charge for the best quality videos via its YouTube Premium subscription.
These are different users who have been able to discover a new feature called “1080p Premium”. For real, you will always have the right to watch a video in Full HD, or even more, but with a very pronounced compression quality, which can sometimes make the image quite poor. Even watching a 4K video on YouTube, you can be confronted with some small problems with artifacts that creep into the image (small squares and sometimes not very clear colors). YouTube then offers a “Premium” quality allowing you to benefit from a better bitrate. Simply put, bitrate means the amount of data distributed to display the video on your screen. Your Full HD or 4K video will therefore be of much higher quality than your neighbor with a lower bitrate.
Of course, this consumes even more MB on your internet connection, so you will have to be careful with your plan if you watch YouTube on your smartphone.
Google seeks above all to make the most of its platform. Advertising revenues are obviously not enough and the YouTube Premium subscription allows the site to have more stable funding than that of advertisements which can be very fluctuating depending on the time of year.
Diversifying YouTube Premium Services
Currently, YouTube Premium mainly allows subscribers to enjoy an ad-free YouTube. But that’s not all since on a smartphone, you can lock your phone without your video/music cutting out. You even have the option of downloading a video directly locally to your computer or smartphone.
For now, the option is not available to all users but you have to imagine that YouTube will want to integrate this functionality via the current YouTube Premium subscription. The Premium formula offers a Standard option at €11.99 per month, a Family pack at €17.99 (valid for 6 accounts), and finally, a student option at €6.99 per month.
However, it is still unclear if the Premium video quality option will require any additional cost. Google is trying a new formula with its YouTube platform and only time will tell if this strategy bears fruit.
