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Hard to tell since they don't release numbers. Found this discussion.
The only person I know who uses it is a guy who exclusively uses cheap stuff and pirates everything. Most people have never heard of it. It's Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, or most of all, just smart TVs.
Most people use the TV's built-in OS, as you said, which is where the Android TV numbers come from.

Also, plenty of people have heard of Fire TV.
 

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Well you can watch 4k on chrome, but not safari on Big Sur. Because Google is blocking the 4k

Not true, I use Safari on BigSur, 4K Youtube works, has been for a few betas... Pretty sure YouTube is checking for VP9 codec support, 4K is only available in VP9 on YouTube, and now AV1. HD and below however are available in both VP9 and H264.

If they really cared about blocking other browsers I don't see why they wouldn't block Firefox, Edge etc.. Iv'e pointed this out about VP9 as a 4K requirement on YT before but it seems you just keep repeating the same thing.
 
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Why are some people here saying the Apple TV 4K will never be able to play 4K YouTube content? Are you seriously saying that Apple just took a wild guess the device could do it when they announced it during WWDC and when they published it on their own product page for the Apple TV 4K as evident by the MacRumors article that you’re commenting on?
 
In all fairness the TeamYouTube Twitter account is run by either bots or morons. Many large content creators have reached out to them for help for various things and it’s always a pain to get a resolution. Folks at the company can’t even call each other, it’s all done via email. Rules are applied unevenly, different reasons are given depending on which bot/person is running the account. 😂 Wouldn’t surprise me if it is something that YouTube needs to enable on their end.
The 2.04.06 YouTube app seen on tvOS App Store was last updated April 29, 2020. If Google was actively monitoring this they would have had a update in the last 6 months. I also do wonder if Apple really did support VP9 within tvOS. In either case we need both to talk to each other and get this working.
 
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hot take i think google was doing something with youtube last night and it will all be fix monday. all my friends and i was noticing videos were rendering slower than normal downloading and uploading.
 
Android TV is by far the most popular TV OS by market share.

In the US at least

I thought Roku was the leader by far. Then Fire TV, then Android TV and then AppleTV. Thats not including Tizen on Samsung TVs or Xbox or Playstation either... Roku, AndroidTV and FireTV have both devices and TV installs.

As to what is used the most and generates the most revenue, I cannot say.
 
I'm starting to wonder if it's Google that's blocking Apple from allowing 4K streaming in favor of using Google's products to view it. Very odd this keeps going on.

Google has been developing their own standard for playback of 4k content so they wouldn't have to license h265.

I honestly can’t understand why it hasn’t been there from day one when the 4K Apple TV launched. I have a 2017 Samsung QLED and the built in YouTube app plays 4K content just fine. I’d expect that a device dedicated to media playback would do that as well to be honest.

This has been covered, and I recommend googling for more details. Your samsung qled can use whatever standards for 4k playback that it would like.

Apple was behind the development of h265, which is very widely used. Google uses VP9 which apple has been hesitant to implement.

In all fairness the TeamYouTube Twitter account is run by either bots or morons. Many large content creators have reached out to them for help for various things and it’s always a pain to get a resolution. Folks at the company can’t even call each other, it’s all done via email. Rules are applied unevenly, different reasons are given depending on which bot/person is running the account. 😂 Wouldn’t surprise me if it is something that YouTube needs to enable on their end.

I'm guessing much like many other social media accounts, the people running it don't immediately get up to date info, nor do they ask (or perhaps have a direct process of asking) for updated info.

I don't think VP9 is that processor intensive if the Apple TV can do H265 videos and HDR.

Probably not, but h265 is hardware decoded and I'm not sure what it would take apple to implement after the fact (unless atv now has the instructions for how to do it with tvOS 14?)

4K is a gimmick anyway to get you to pay a higher cost for media

please, absolutely no one pay any attention to this whatsoever. either this person (desperately) needs to get their eyes checked, enjoys scoffing at things because it just feels so good to do, or they bought a 4k tv at 55" and tried to sit 20ft away from it.

4k content, especially 4kHDR content displayed on a good -> great quality tv is absolutely worth the extra cost.

pretending like 1080p content on a 10+ year old plasma isn't inferior to a modern LG OLED is disingenuous at absolute best.
 
Super annoying. When I want to use YouTube I usually turn off my Apple TV "4K" and just use my TCL Roku YouTube app. It was always ridiculous but for Apple to make a big deal out of TVOS 14 being able to play 4K YouTube, then rolling it out without the functionality makes Apple look like amateurs.
 
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It’s just a switch on their end to flip. App hasn’t been updated since April. Whatever Google, we know your game. Is Covid their excuse for not having enough developers to update the app? Even mobile safari you need to be Premium now for PIP? Ya.
 
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It still works in Big Sur.

So this seems to be more than simply being a switch that Google toggled to "off" for all Macs. Which model of a Mac are you using in that screenshot? 4K and HDR disappeared entirely for me on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016). I am now thinking it could be a minimum CPU requirement since Skylake does not support VP9 decode.
 
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