YouTube confirms testing better 1080p quality for Premium users
YouTube has admitted that it is experimenting with a new 1080p video quality for Premium subscribers, giving them a better bitrate. Recently, some YouTube Premium subscribers took to Reddit to report a new video quality available for videos. The new “1080p Premium” option in the video quality settings is currently available to select YouTube Premium subscribers, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed.
According to YouTube’s Paul Pennington, quoted as saying by The Verge, “1080p Premium is an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p which provides more information per pixel that results in a higher quality viewing experience.” They added that there are no changes to the video quality options that are available currently, including the regular 1080p resolution, on YouTube. The new 1080p Premium option is not widely available yet, which means most Premium users do not have access to it.
A higher bitrate in 1o80p Premium means more data travels in each second of a video than what happens with the regular 1080p quality. Because of that, a 1080p video may end up looking better than a poor 4K video. YouTube may, thus, be planning to offer this option that enhances the viewing experience behind a paywall. Apart from bitrate, colour depth is another factor that decides how good a video can look, irrespective of the video quality.
But how different would the 1080p Premium and the regular 1080p look? YouTube’s standard 1080p bitrate is somewhere between 8Mbps and 10Mbps, whereas the bitrate of a 1080p Blu-ray video maxes out at 40Mbps, so the difference is visible. The regular 1080p video would, thus, look blockier than the Blu-ray video. Moreover, the quality of the video also depends on the codec used for compressing the video. So, if YouTube is using the same codec to stream both 1080p and 1080p Premium quality videos, the latter should look better.
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