As you say, it’s all about profitability. Making it worse for non-paying viewers is one of the most commonly used tactics, so I’d say the complaint is valid.
Streaming in 4K or even higher is free for everyone, that’s also more expensive for them. The fact that 1080 looks so bad to begin with on their platform is just ridiculous and unnecessary.
Forgot to touch on the video bad point: I don’t have points of comparison between YT bitrates and 3rd party platforms. I find 2K to be plenty sharp and serviceable. And I don’t know a 3rd Party serving said content anyway.
1080p isn’t a quality standard so I would expect quality to vary anyway.
Yes, you’re right, the naming schemes are a bit all over the place.
I meant 1440p.
1440p monitors are usually referred to as 2K, but that’s probably more of a marketing thing.
There are no non-paying viewers. You pay in ads or you pay in dollarinios.
The high Bitrate was an add on for premium people. Streaming in 4k was discontinued due to low adoption and enormous cost. It is available for premium users today. You could argue for enshittyfication there, but are on shaky grounds for low adoption rate. A short experiment does not entitle you, in my mind.
Edit: appeartly outrage won and 4k is free once more
Well I block ads and I definitely never gave them a single coin. Besides that, I think you know what I meant with non-paying viewers.
That is not true, I often stream on 4K when I’m on my computer. Everything below 1440p is blurry and mushy (on YouTube) on screens above 10”. At least for me, I’m a bit peculiar with this.
I just checked and apparently they stopped pay walling 4k and 1440p.
It’s not blurry on my 4k Display so I feel like you are being dishonest. Only when very high Bitrate is needed everything goes to shit. And that’s only e.g. flowing sand.
You feel like I’m dishonest? Well, great. But I’m not.
Obviously it heavily depends on what you’re watching, I’m for example often watch “Digital Foundry” and in their videos the difference is quite huge.
Ahhh, sweeping camera motions in very detailed environments while comparing pixels. Yeah. That’s an extremely demanding task where bit rate matters a lot.
Slide shows work well enough, such as Matt Parker’s videos or well there is your problem or civ or magic the gathering.
Yes, that’s why I’m having such a problem with the low bitrate. If I watch a video of a person sitting at their desk, talking into the camera, I also don’t really care, this kind of content mostly wouldn’t even be necessary in higher resolutions. Content creators still upload 4K versions so YouTube doesn’t butcher the quality too much. Thus creating a problem for themselves, as they need to provide more storage.
That sucks. I guess you do raise a point but looking at how profitable YouTube currently is and how hardware prices might change that I do feel like they maybe should penalize heavy users more, I.e. locking those qualities behind a paywall and encouraging piracy so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth.
An aside: Did you know that some piracy websites even charge for bandwidth costs? Maybe that’s a viable way to prevent you having to pay for it.
That does really suck for you tho. But I cannot see another way that doesn’t erode creator profit/livelyhood.
Edit: I use about 100GB of data to YouTube a month on my phone alone. Probably an extra 70 on my PC. At 2€/100GB I am barely profitable considering they gotta store the data somewhere. 12? Euros a month for premium with like 60% going to creators does not leave loads of profit.
I am not in favour of it, but I can see that it would make sense for them to lock higher qualities behind a paywall. Locking high-quality 1080p behind a paywall and leaving 1440p and 4K free to stream doesn’t really support their case. I would gladly stream more in simple HD if it would look better.
I honestly don’t think, that YouTube needs more ways to charge their customers. They already have several ongoing revenue streams and the subscriptions are not even the main source. Additionally, whenever they change something it usually gets worse for viewers.
Your calculation leaves out the billions they make with advertisement already, eroding creator profit as you mention it is not a real threat currently. YouTube grows steadily, they wouldn’t even need to raise prices, that happens because of company greed and to serve the almighty dollar.
And let’s not forget, that YouTube belongs to Alphabet. They do have the infinite money glitch in full use.
Nature videos with the ‘enhanced birate’ option piss me off the most. Personally, they’re basically unwatchable. There’s nothing worse than watching a gorgeous shot of a waterfall, forest, river, lake, or whatever, and then getting ambushed by those fuckugly compression artifacts. Hell, I’ve seen dirt look bad enough to notice because of it.
As you say, it’s all about profitability. Making it worse for non-paying viewers is one of the most commonly used tactics, so I’d say the complaint is valid.
Streaming in 4K or even higher is free for everyone, that’s also more expensive for them. The fact that 1080 looks so bad to begin with on their platform is just ridiculous and unnecessary.
Forgot to touch on the video bad point: I don’t have points of comparison between YT bitrates and 3rd party platforms. I find 2K to be plenty sharp and serviceable. And I don’t know a 3rd Party serving said content anyway.
1080p isn’t a quality standard so I would expect quality to vary anyway.
YouTube compresses heavier and has lower bitrates on 1080p and lower, that’s why 2K and above look waaay better in comparison.
2k is 1080p.
Yes, you’re right, the naming schemes are a bit all over the place. I meant 1440p. 1440p monitors are usually referred to as 2K, but that’s probably more of a marketing thing.
I know them as 3k. That’s even worse
Wow, never heard that. It’s not even close to 3K! It’s 2.5K if anything.
We should drop the “K” naming, honestly. 1080p or FHD 1440p or QHD 2160p or UHD
I prefer the K naming style. It is appropriately fuzzy. 1440p is so many letters and who tf remembers all the hd variants.
Lossy compression is gonna screw with the image anyway.
I hate it for the exact same reason- it’s fuzzy to the point of useless and you end up breaking out actual resolution numbers anyways.
There are no non-paying viewers. You pay in ads or you pay in dollarinios.
The high Bitrate was an add on for premium people. Streaming in 4k was discontinued due to low adoption and enormous cost. It is available for premium users today. You could argue for enshittyfication there, but are on shaky grounds for low adoption rate. A short experiment does not entitle you, in my mind.
Edit: appeartly outrage won and 4k is free once more
Well I block ads and I definitely never gave them a single coin. Besides that, I think you know what I meant with non-paying viewers.
That is not true, I often stream on 4K when I’m on my computer. Everything below 1440p is blurry and mushy (on YouTube) on screens above 10”. At least for me, I’m a bit peculiar with this.
I just checked and apparently they stopped pay walling 4k and 1440p.
It’s not blurry on my 4k Display so I feel like you are being dishonest. Only when very high Bitrate is needed everything goes to shit. And that’s only e.g. flowing sand.
You feel like I’m dishonest? Well, great. But I’m not. Obviously it heavily depends on what you’re watching, I’m for example often watch “Digital Foundry” and in their videos the difference is quite huge.
Ahhh, sweeping camera motions in very detailed environments while comparing pixels. Yeah. That’s an extremely demanding task where bit rate matters a lot. Slide shows work well enough, such as Matt Parker’s videos or well there is your problem or civ or magic the gathering.
Yes, that’s why I’m having such a problem with the low bitrate. If I watch a video of a person sitting at their desk, talking into the camera, I also don’t really care, this kind of content mostly wouldn’t even be necessary in higher resolutions. Content creators still upload 4K versions so YouTube doesn’t butcher the quality too much. Thus creating a problem for themselves, as they need to provide more storage.
That sucks. I guess you do raise a point but looking at how profitable YouTube currently is and how hardware prices might change that I do feel like they maybe should penalize heavy users more, I.e. locking those qualities behind a paywall and encouraging piracy so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth.
An aside: Did you know that some piracy websites even charge for bandwidth costs? Maybe that’s a viable way to prevent you having to pay for it.
That does really suck for you tho. But I cannot see another way that doesn’t erode creator profit/livelyhood.
Edit: I use about 100GB of data to YouTube a month on my phone alone. Probably an extra 70 on my PC. At 2€/100GB I am barely profitable considering they gotta store the data somewhere. 12? Euros a month for premium with like 60% going to creators does not leave loads of profit.
I am not in favour of it, but I can see that it would make sense for them to lock higher qualities behind a paywall. Locking high-quality 1080p behind a paywall and leaving 1440p and 4K free to stream doesn’t really support their case. I would gladly stream more in simple HD if it would look better.
I honestly don’t think, that YouTube needs more ways to charge their customers. They already have several ongoing revenue streams and the subscriptions are not even the main source. Additionally, whenever they change something it usually gets worse for viewers. Your calculation leaves out the billions they make with advertisement already, eroding creator profit as you mention it is not a real threat currently. YouTube grows steadily, they wouldn’t even need to raise prices, that happens because of company greed and to serve the almighty dollar. And let’s not forget, that YouTube belongs to Alphabet. They do have the infinite money glitch in full use.
Nature videos with the ‘enhanced birate’ option piss me off the most. Personally, they’re basically unwatchable. There’s nothing worse than watching a gorgeous shot of a waterfall, forest, river, lake, or whatever, and then getting ambushed by those fuckugly compression artifacts. Hell, I’ve seen dirt look bad enough to notice because of it.
Fair, but in the past that option just didn’t exist and you still would have had the option that sucks.
And it’s not that much extra Bitrate.