Exactly. Very few people (although they're ALL in this thread, I'm sure!) can tell the difference between 4K and 1080p on a large screen, let alone their phone.
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You May Soon Need to Be a YouTube Premium Subscriber to Watch 4K Videos
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What's an IPA?
Still, while skippng an ad may be easy, I fear Youtube could lock 4K behind YT Premium even with 3rd Party Apps.
There is YouTube Premium Lite in the Benelux and Nordic countries. It costs €6,99 a month and includes ad-free YouTube, but does not include downloads and background playing.
I am not seeing any quality restrictions in the app, for what it's worth.
I think YT premium is worth it personally. There’s so much quality content on YouTube, you can watch a lot of full length movies, documentaries and live concerts. And if I’m watching an hour+ long video, I don’t want ads interrupting all the time.
The thing that everyone forgets is that the backend infrastructure for YouTube is incredibly expensive. They basically are just constantly adding new servers all the time to keep up with demand of people continuously uploading videos. As time goes on, they need more and more storage, bandwidth, and server capacity to keep it running. People want everything to be free, but there’s a lot of costs involved in running, maintaining, and supporting infrastructure. I don’t mind paying for it.
The thing that everyone forgets is that the backend infrastructure for YouTube is incredibly expensive. They basically are just constantly adding new servers all the time to keep up with demand of people continuously uploading videos. As time goes on, they need more and more storage, bandwidth, and server capacity to keep it running. People want everything to be free, but there’s a lot of costs involved in running, maintaining, and supporting infrastructure. I don’t mind paying for it.
@brijazz watching on a phone it is indeed marginal, but when you watch YouTube mostly on TV's the difference is easily noticeable.
Man I'm really done with Google's ******** It's disgusting, not only they steal data for profit but now they feel like they deserve to be paid for it.
I’m on premium but tbh 99% of what i watch is 480p at max - old tv shows - so couldn’t care less
Would be interesting to see if the Vinegar extension worked. I would think if Google really wanted to paywall the content, then the source media files would be restricted from access by unauthorised accounts rather than just limiting the capability of their media player, meaning the extension wouldn't allow bypassing the restriction. It'd seem very daft to me for the 4k streams to still be publicly accessible if they did want to paywall the feature for the exact reason that something like Vinegar could get around it so easily.
That will take care of ads, not the 4k issue which is what this post is about.Just leaving this here...
Vinegar - Tube Cleaner
Vinegar is a Safari extension that replaces the YouTube player with a minimal HTML video tag. It removes ads, restores picture-in-picture, and keeps videos playing in the background. Note: The "can read information from webpages" text in the permission section is just unfortunate wording...apps.apple.com
Vinegar — Safari Extension That Replaces YouTube Embeds With Simple HTML 5 Video Tags
Link to: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-vinegardaringfireball.net
This Safari extension replaces YouTube's video player with one that supports PiP and more [U] - 9to5Mac
It’s no secret that using YouTube in the browser on your iPhone or iPad is a rather unpleasant experience. And...9to5mac.com
I have in the constant one stop ads and subscribed, because you can’t get an ad free app for You Tube on iOS and they make it incredibly difficult if you want to use the webpage only. I don’t think this is a good move at all either locking it behind a paywall. They don’t make the content after all.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
Suspended
What a joke. YouTube is really trying to be like Netflix now. It’s too bad it’s not going to work. I’m still not going to become a paid premium member.
YouTube isn’t giving anything away for free. They’re making plenty of money on ads.
They should include it as a perk for folks who pay for more storage for Google Drive.