Recent evidence surfaced on Reddit suggests that soon the only way to watch videos in high-res 2160p resolution will be via a YouTube Premium subscription. That’s an $11.99 a month charge for crisper videos, which seems like a steep price to pay.
This potential revelation comes from Reddit user ‘Ihatesmokealarms’ (opens in new tab), who claims to have set their service to the U.S version, after they posted screenshots of the resolution options for a video they were watching. The screenshot shows the option for the highest resolution of 2160p and the dreaded text “Premium – tap to upgrade.”
The news comes hot on the heels of the platform’s unpopular trial of up to ten unskippable ads before videos. Fortunately, that trial ultimately proved unsuccessful.
YouTube Premium has plenty to offer subscribers, including an ad-free service with YouTube Music (great for downloading songs and listening offline) and exclusive content. But to start locking off features from the basic service could cause a backlash; 2.6 billion people use YouTube every month, yet only 50 million people pay for Premium.
As of yet, there has been no confirmation from Google (which owns YouTube) on this potential measure but 4K TVs are not purely aspirational technology these days. Some of the best 4K TVs are competitively priced (see the deal block below), and if YouTube were to deny potentially millions of people access to what is fast becoming a standard feature, it could certainly backfire.
Of course, this could all be Google testing various features of YouTube that it could integrate into the Premium package, rather than a clear indication that you’ll need to pay for 4K in the near future.
And Google has proved in the past that it will backtrack on initiatives that have proven wildly unpopular with its users. So, time will tell if 4K resolution videos will indeed become a YouTube Premium feature or not.
