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If YouTube would double or triple 4K bitrates and allow for surround sound content I might consider it, but right now 4K looks terrible on most content I watch
 
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I'm a Youtube premium subscriber so I don't have to watch ads since there is so much classical music on Youtube. I really don't care since I don't have a 4K TV anyway and people should be grateful that they can watch Youtube for free in the first place.
The new attitude, everything you do should be for free, or I'll steal it. Everything I do, I'm entitled to be paid top dollar for...
 
So many of you like youtube so much you are upset that the 4k version will go behind a paywall, yet the same group of you refuse to pay a small amount to subscribe to the premium version. It is worth the $
 
I am too and totally agree.

I pay Youtube to remove ads. Fair. But paying them to add previously free features?
In the same vein, YT Premium Lite is spuriously crippled. Seems like it’s more about forcing people to purchase YT Music than it is about YT itself.
 
What people don't realize is that an iPhone 14 pro max is about 4.6 million pixels short of 4k resolution. Even 1440p is a higher resolution than the iPhone 14 Pro Max, so that resolution would be plenty.

If you're watching on a 4K tv though, that's a different story.
 
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Premium subscriber since day one however I pay third world rates.
No complaints on my end
 
That kinda sucks for people on the free plan, but YouTube Premium is one of my most highly recommend subscriptions. Way more content and variety than Netflix, HBO Max, etc. Easily worth the $12/mo.
 
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I like such kinds of statements. So where do you alternatively watch videos as everything is hosted on YouTube these days? Please don't mention Vimeo.
Kinda depends on what kind of content you like.

If it's primarily educational and video-essay stuff, Nebula is a good option. Additional benefit is that it's a co-op between the YT creators that post their videos there, is ad free, has original content and comes free with a Curiosity Stream subscription (if that's your thing, otherwise you can just get it separate as well).
 
Grateful? No! I'm a very important internet user and all content is supposed to be available at max quality for free and without ads! Why should I be be limited to measly 1080p - I'm watching on a 6" phone screen after all, I neeeedd 4K.
Good thing content creators can choose from all the other video providers which have flourished in the face of YouTube. It's not like below or at-cost pricing to kill off competitors, then aggressively pursuing revenue once they are mostly dead is anticompetitive or anything.
 
Good thing content creators can choose from all the other video providers which have flourished in the face of YouTube. It's not like below or at-cost pricing to kill off competitors, then aggressively pursuing revenue once they are mostly dead is anticompetitive or anything.
It is pretty easy to host your own video on a CDN these days. Tons of options that aren't YouTube: Vimeo, Cloudflare, AWS, Akamai, etc. I agree that more content creators should do that instead of farming out on YouTube.
 
Feels like all this does is just holds 4k back more as a standard and renders a lot of people's TVs more useless. I haven't paid for 4k anything yet cuz if I did i'd probably be out twice as much money across the board for anything I watch...that doesn't seem very sustainable for most people who are already hurting right now or have been for a while. Even buying 4k movies for a little more doesn't seem worth since 1080p is downsampled from 4k and still looks amazing with a decent bitrate from something like Apple, this just makes me more aggravated with YouTube than anything.

Btw they have audio only behind a paywall too, the amount of extra time I would use YouTube to listen to stuff if it had audio only available seems worth them allowing it for free much like Twitch. That's probably extra hours or even days a week of extra engagement they're just leaving on the table, may even start to dominate more in areas like esports where lots of people just leave in audio only mode to listen to streams until a match they wanna watch comes along. Some even leave it on and fall asleep to streams like me, very useful tool but throwing it behind a pay wall seems like a deek move.
 
honestly, how can people stand watching YouTube without a Premium subscription?

I have subscribed to YouTube for the last several years.

A few weeks ago, I was on a new phone and couldn't remember my Google password, so I couldn't access YouTube Premium. It was the most painful couple of days. Those ads were driving me crazy.

Now I understand why my friends/co-workers get mad when I share YouTube video links with them. they dont' have Premium and the ads must be driving them mad. :(
Many of us just slowed/stopped watching as YouTube, vs spending over $120 a year for them to let me use features the OS provides or which used to be free before they paywalled them.

Youtube premium is only an advantage over free YouTube now, because they have gradually made free YouTube into 💩. I prefer to not fund that sort of bait-and-switch.
 
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I use YouTube very very little (maybe an hour a month, if that) and only on my laptop which isn't 4k, but this is crap. I'll just stop using it altogether; the site is already littered with ads and junk.
 
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90% of comments on this thread are bots praising YT Premium, because they already use the service.

That's not the point: the point is that Google is/will start charging to watch 4k content. How is that "ok"? I bet you're the ones that went crazy when Netflix or other streaming platforms increase the price by 1$, kekw.

This forum is truly pathetic sometimes.
 
90% of comments on this thread are bots praising YT Premium, because they already use the service.

That's not the point: the point is that Google is/will start charging to watch 4k content. How is that "ok"? I bet you're the ones that went crazy when Netflix or other streaming platforms increase the price by 1$, kekw.

This forum is truly pathetic sometimes.
I think it's pretty "ok" for services to charge for features. I much prefer that to any ads business model.
 
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Nice desperate try Google but no thanks, you can make all of your videos 144p and still I will not pay for premium. In fact please do so cause I'd love to see some streaming competition flourishing
 
cool but I use custom youtube apps that might just bypass that too . uYouPlus gets me pip, background audio, free download of videos, skips ads, skips sponsors, skips intro animations, return dislike button all in one custom app
 
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Nice desperate try Google but no thanks, you can make all of your videos 144p and still I will not pay for premium. In fact please do so cause I'd love to see some streaming competition flourishing
There is tons of streaming competition: Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Vimeo, etc. It has never been cheaper to host a 4K video on a fast CDN.
 
There is tons of streaming competition: Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Vimeo, etc. It has never been cheaper to host a 4K video on a fast CDN.
Yea I was talking about streaming services focused on user creators not big Hollywood studios
 
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