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.
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.
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.
They do make billions on adds, but that doesn’t mean their bottom line looks great. And they don’t advertise to paying users. Adds also pay way less than subscriptions. And they are surely not cracking down on piracy out of spite, but economic need. Just consider the publicity impact so clearly visible here… They serve so much video to so many people, even in the third world where ad revenue is very low. Yes they belong to alphabet. But that does not mean they can not make money. YouTube must not be taken to behind the shed.
But the fact is, their bottom line does look great. Financially, they’re doing great. They do advertise to paying customers, just not to all of them, there’s still premium and premium lite (the most idiotic name ever).
Of course, a single ad pays less than a single subscription, but in total they earn way more money with ads than with subs, so that point doesn’t really stand. What I’m saying is, it already is in a place where it’s pretty much too big to fail and it’s far from failing. YouTube as a company does well.
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.
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.
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.
They do make billions on adds, but that doesn’t mean their bottom line looks great. And they don’t advertise to paying users. Adds also pay way less than subscriptions. And they are surely not cracking down on piracy out of spite, but economic need. Just consider the publicity impact so clearly visible here… They serve so much video to so many people, even in the third world where ad revenue is very low. Yes they belong to alphabet. But that does not mean they can not make money. YouTube must not be taken to behind the shed.
But the fact is, their bottom line does look great. Financially, they’re doing great. They do advertise to paying customers, just not to all of them, there’s still premium and premium lite (the most idiotic name ever). Of course, a single ad pays less than a single subscription, but in total they earn way more money with ads than with subs, so that point doesn’t really stand. What I’m saying is, it already is in a place where it’s pretty much too big to fail and it’s far from failing. YouTube as a company does well.
The revenue of other people shouldn’t finance me view content. If I do a per person napkin calculation there is no merit in naming the total.