Youtubelaunched in 2005, and YouTube Premiumintroduced as Music Key in 2014, have coexisted for almost a decade without the benefits offered by a paid subscription affecting the quality of the videos that users of free accounts play, but this changes in 2023. YouTube has announced a series of news coming to YouTube Premium and among which stand out that the platform will offer different video qualities depending on whether the user is paid or not.
The difference will not be in the resolution with which a video is played, but yes in the bit rate it uses. The bit rate refers to the amount of information it contains and is measured in megabits per second. The higher bit rate or bitratethe image is clearer and more detailedso there is a clear difference between a video at 1080p with a low rate and another at the same resolution but with a high rate.
As explained by the company on its blog, YouTube Premium users will have access to a new option “in the coming weeks” called 1080p Premium via the iOS app. It will appear along with the other resolution options for the video with an improved bitrate compared to the 1080p option that non-paid users will be able to play. YouTube has indicated that it is an “experiment” that will also be brought to the web version “soon”, but has not mentioned Android users nor have you quantized the new bitrate.
The rest of the news announced for YouTube Premium consist of share watching videos with other users through Google Meet in the case of Android and FaceTime in the case of iOS. They will also be able to create video queues to avoid having to select the next one when finishing a playback, starting it on a device and continue it in another and schedule a queue of video downloads to be able to see them offline.
By 11.99 euros per monthYouTube Premium offers as its main incentive a user experience Whithout ads in the videos or ads in the apps and on the web. Download videos, background playback and access to YouTube Premium are incentives that have convinced about 2% of the YouTube user base. Google doesn’t give much data on paid users, but it did say in 2021 that it had reached 50 millionfigure from which the percentage can be inferred.
In any case, it remains to be seen if the measure goes beyond being an experiment that we are going to find in the coming weeks and if YouTube will adopt as a stable policy to offer worse reproduction quality to those who do not pay.
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