YouTube Experiments With High-Bitrate “1080p Premium” Option
YouTube Experiments With High-Bitrate “1080p Premium” Option
This option will co-exist alongside standard 1080p, with higher bitrate reducing the amount of compression artifacts.
Image: u/KZedUK (Reddit)
YouTube has confirmed to The Verge that the platform is testing a high-bitrate quality option for 1080p streams – the ‘1080p Premium’ is currently in testing and Reddit user u/KZedUK spotted the feature earlier. A bitrate determines how many data can be fit into a video, as lower bitrate will require the video to compress harder for smaller file sizes (or data consumption). This often comes at a quality cost in the form of jaggy color gradients, or blocky pixels – in extreme cases this makes the perceived quality much lower than its resolution should do.
A typical 1080p YouTube video should range in between 8-12Mbps bitrate per Google’s recommendation in this support article, but even that is far lower than what you see in Blu-rays which can go as high as 40Mbps. On top of that, bitrates are not the same across different encoding formats – for example, a 3Mbps AV1 video is higher in perceived quality level over commonly-used formats such as H.264 in the same 3Mbps bitrate. An explainer courtesy of Tom Scott sums it up nicely:
Alright, so with that out of the way, let’s talk about the 1080p Premium option that is spotted by that Reddit user. Using the ‘Stats for Nerds’ to view the video information revealed that this option streams in 13Mbps instead of the standard 8Mbps – keep in mind that there’s something called Variable Bitrate (VBR) which can turn the bitrate up and down depending on what’s on screen. So far it is not known what is the exact target bitrate for the Premium option.
So why YouTube is making this a paid feature? It takes bandwidth to send data – and to provide the sheer number of users on the platform and not overload the server, compression is a must in order to make sure everyone can still watch whatever content they want, at a minor cost of perceived quality (this makes the video less data hungry if you have quotas, too). Providing more bitrate will incur a bandwidth cost and server cost, so YouTube needs to cover these potential expenses if it needs to serve more data over the Internet.
This isn’t the first time YouTube is trying out Premium features when it comes to video quality – last year the company experimented with locking 4K behind the Premium paywall which naturally got the community dissatisfied. The key difference this time is that this option is new, it won’t replace the existing option – so regular users who watch for free can keep watching, as usual.
Source: The Verge
Pokdepinion: I’m in favor of this feature for Premium, but it won’t be too useful for videos that are old enough to simply not have the bitrate requirements to warrant for this feature.
