YouTube is giving Premium subscribers higher-quality video than everyone else | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is giving Premium subscribers higher-quality video than everyone else

theverge.com

35 pointsangst45 comments

There is little reason to not pay for YouTube Premium, in my opinion. Worth every penny.

YouTube TV, on the other hand, well, I need to cancel that.

It's the most expensive streaming service subscription I have (family) but it gets 100x more use than all the others combined. I'd love to know how the fee I pay gets distributed to channels I watch though, assuming it even does.

I've asked a few streamers for their perspective, and the response is vague but more per view than ad impressions

I'm assuming this is mostly just because the ad revenue on youtube is pretty low

I forgot the source but in 2020 it was ~30% to YouTube and ~70% to creators (in watchtime proportion, if you have watched someone outside of YT partner program it will go to YouTube), but it was three years ago so I'm not sure if something have changed here.

Agreed. The ability to just have all ads be non-existent on every platform is super nice.

Yes, on desktop I can use an ad blocker but that doesn't solve the app or smart tv usage.

For android app there is newpipe

Or youtube ReVanced, also incorporates SponsorBlock

Libretube is becoming a good alternative

For a smart TV, if it's an Android TV (or "Google TV"), you can install SmartTubeNext.

YouTube TV was asking an extra 20$ per month for UHD streaming, all you got was some sparse 4K sports programming. Not to mention they couldn’t get the color space correct, looked like r709 content played through r2020 container. Any orange or brown was shifted red. I believe they lowered the cost to 10$ per month for uhd add on.

What content on YT do you find to be valuable? Personally I find video to be a poor method of finding and sharing information, and anything that's not information is just a thinly veiled ad. Most "reviews" aren't, and most talking heads just spout shite.

I watch PBS Newshour, Frontline documentaries, other documentaries, catch up on the weather and local news, and informative content on trains, urban design/planning, and transportation.

Yeah, reading this stuff would probably be better, and I do also read a lot. But sometimes I just want to sit back and relax while someone presents their information to me.

See, this sounds interesting to me, but the discoverability for me is still dire years down the line, even using the same YT account. Never been impressed with the recommendation algorithm, despite thumbing videos accordingly, doing the whole "not interested" thing and ticking which box as to why.

It would be worth it if it allowed to properly use youtube-dl for archiving purposes.

That seems like an arbitrary requirement - no other media streaming platform allows for this. In fact, YouTube is the only one that’s even possible to reasonably use/download for free.

It's not arbitrary, it's fundamental. And I don't pay for any streaming media platform currently so that point says nothing. I did pay for Apple TV and Netflix before, torrenting shows satisfied my archiving requirements in those cases.

It's belittling of the user to refer to their use-case requirements and cost analysis as "arbitrary"

No, it’s not. Expecting to download content freely from a subscription-based platform, where the creator/producer has ownership, is an unreasonable requirement.

Go buy a DVD, or convince YouTubers to release MP4s for money.

The whole point of those platforms is to reproduce content for my personal consumption. After it is reproduced, no matter how, streamed or downloaded etc, original creator still has the exactly same degree of ownership as before, so their interests are unaffected.

If I don't pay, YT profits from me watching ads so to provide any reproduction capabilities that mean I watch ads less would take bread away from their tables so that's okay. If I do pay, YT profits from that, so I expect it to provide appropriate reproduction capabilities at least by not throttling youtube-dl.

If your expectations were widely accepted as true, then all streaming platforms would provide seamless DRM-free downloads.

Why would they cater to the needs of captive user base? It's not like there is some alternative and I can stop using YT. I just don't buy YT premium, that's all. In fact I know no one who does, so I guess I'm not alone in this.

That's the perspective of YouTube maybe, but that isn't the perspective of this individual user. That doesn't affect their personal requirements when choosing software. It's a free market.

ytp-dl seems to work fine, and is faster than youtube-dl.

You mean yt-dlp?

Does YouTube premium also block sponsor segments?

Nope. There are tools to do that, such as SponsorBlock. I tried it but it calls home pretty often and sometimes does weird things to the videos's timing. I found it to be an annoyance. I think I did away with it, when it advertise something or tried to upsell something (forgotten). If it just ask me to buy it and keep quite and calls only Youtube/Google, it might have been OK.

It also is not available for all videos. Nonetheless, I've a feeling I should not rob off the creators, a lot of whom I follow are awesome, of their sponsor earnings.

> I should not rob off the creators, a lot of whom I follow are awesome, of their sponsor earnings.

I have never—literally not once—bought anything because of an overt online advertisement or sponsorship. Not because of any conviction, not because I dislike ads, not even because I didn’t have the money, but because none of the things being advertised got me interested even the few times I followed up on the ad. Even if we go full Laplace’s rule probability nerd on this, there sure is a lot of zeroes after the decimal point in that conversion rate.

Are the publishers (and consequently creators) being robbed of their ad money now that I’ve installed an adblocker, or were the advertisers being scammed by selling them worthless impressions in the decade before I did? I don’t think either is quite true, but one is probably about as true as the other.

SponsorBlock segments are crowd-submitted, so it needs to check the server for the latest segments. That said, the entire ~4.2GiB database can downloaded, and you can even set the extension to use a custom API server instance if you'd like.

> I've a feeling I should not rob off the creators

If you don't buy what they advertise the only person being robbed is you. They already got paid before even uploading the video

Personally, I just skip them TiVo-style 90% of the time. As long as there’s nothing unskippable, it doesn’t really bother me.

No, it doesn't block those.

For about a year I had a side project involving learning a lot about encoding (with ffmpeg) to cram as much resolution, quality, and detail into short videos while keeping them under 3 megabytes. Most of my source material was from YouTube so I ended up learning a lot about their bitrate, and I can guess a fair few of the compression and encoding settings they must be using (they’re not great, but that’s to be expected as they have to optimize for compatibility and compute efficiency across a ridiculous range of content). It is practically certain that it’s possible for YouTube pack more quality into the same bits, so I hope they’re offering more than just “higher bitrate with the same settings”.

One way to higher quality I found was you can represent more uncompressed data with the same number of compressed bits (so you end up with slightly less lossy compression). Another way was you can get higher subjective quality by picking the right bits to throw away (your compression is just as lossy but you’ve shifted where that loss happens into subjectively less important parts of the data). I think there might be some gotcha where these two things are actually identical in some deeper way, but it feels like they’re quite different.

The fact that they’re offering it to paying customers is hopefully the leverage needed by engineers to justify spending a bit more compute on better encoding settings.

(Another thought in this area is that since encoding is paid roughly once per video uploaded, you could have a “premium uploader” service that lets uploaders play around with some of the settings, or at least use a better quality preset. Many uploaders would pay ten bucks per video to do that, I have no doubt.)

The actual cost to them, in most cases, is just so marginal. It is a sign of an uncompetitive space when products create nearly pointless product segmentation, when it's not based in cost.

> According to YouTube, the new 1080p Premium option is “an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p” that’s supposed to make things look crisper, particularly with videos heavy on detail and motion.

So they agree that 1080p and UHD are only names for whatever they want to give you.

And how crisper is the new "enhanced bitrate version of 1080p" ?

> So they agree that 1080p and UHD are only names for whatever they want to give you.

Bitrate is everything, you can have 8k that look worse than DVD

YouTube with Ads is akin to browsing the internet with no Adblockers. I have seen people browsing around with it and I keep hearing Jane‘s voice, “I have it how I like it.”[1]

YouTube Premium is an easy fix, and with its subsidized pricing in India, it is a steal. The family plan is less than $2.5 monthly. Unfortunately, my wife would sometimes complain, “Why am I not seeing any ads? I have it how I like it.”

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDNmyyrEZho

Damn. It's 12 EUR/month in Ireland.

£15.99/month in rip off UK

Yeah, I won't pay that. The value just isn't there in terms of what content I do consume from YT, which is very little.

I think this price might be part Apple tax. I just went on the browser and it's £11.99 but it's £15.99 through the iOS Youtube App so it's actually better value than IE if bought online.

Ha, timely, as vanced appears to have finally stopped working for me today. I dunno if there's an update or successor yet, but time to figure that out or cough up for premium I guess.

ReVanced is the successor. It patches your existing YouTube app. For me it still works flawlessly.

I'm using revanced and have started seeing hiccups. Tha fully SmartTube in my TV still works.

For $16/month, yeah right, okay.

YouTube has regional pricing so if $16pm is too much for you, VPN into a “lower avg income” country and sign up via a browser.

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