The test made 4K a premium feature
The Bitrate and Quality of YouTube vs. the Cost of Its Implications for Video Quality, Bitrate, Color Depth, and Bitrate
The reason YouTube doesn’t just show you the original video file at its maximum bitrate is that doing so would be expensive, both for them and potentially for you, depending on your speed and data cap. The lower a video’s bitrate, and thus the lower its quality, the less bandwidth it takes up in the journey from YouTube’s servers to your screen. The test shows that people will be allowed to use more quality if they pay for the service.
In the US, a subscription to YouTube Premium will cost you $11 bucks per month. The service grants access to YouTube Music Premium, as well as in-app downloads, background play, and most importantly: ad-free viewing. According to 9to5Google, a previous test saw the company place as many as ten unskippable ads onto a single video.
While 1080p describes a video’s resolution, or the number of pixels that make up the image, there are more factors that go into overall video quality. Good video looking better than bad 4K footage can be due to Bitrate and color depth. Bitrate is often used to describe how much data is used to transfer each second of video.
