YouTube should not have to pay for 4K or higher resolution ad-free viewing unless you want to pay: A comment on a Reddit user

Some users thought that the idea of having to pay was a sign of the platform’s downfall, and others said it was understandable given the cost of streaming 4K content. With the announcement that it had turned off the experiment, opened the 4K option for everyone and was even going to make premium subscriptions mandatory, it seemed like they were responding to the ridicule that was heaped upon the experiment. It’s unclear how many people were actually restricted from choosing higher resolutions when the test was in effect.

The price of a YouTube Premium subscription varies across the world, with prices in the US starting at $11.98 per month. The service grants access to YouTube Music Premium, as well as in-app downloads, background play, and most importantly: ad-free viewing. YouTube has been known for some fairly aggressive advertising, with 9to5Google reporting that a previous test saw the company place as many as ten unskippable ads onto a single video.

However, it’s generally accurate to say that video encoded with the same codec but at a higher bitrate will look better. That seems to be what YouTube’s doing — one Reddit user with access to the feature posted a screenshot of the company’s “Stats for Nerds” tool, which shows that the Premium 1080p option ran at around 13 Mbps versus 8 Mbps in the standard mode for the same video. However, it’s worth noting that YouTube usually uses variable bitrate encoding, meaning that the amount of data it uses will fluctuate a bit depending on what’s shown on screen.