YouTube is Testing New ‘1080p Premium’ Video Quality

Google has started testing a new ‘1080p Premium’ video quality on YouTube for Premium subscribers. After some users had started discussing the new video quality option on Reddit, Paul Pennington, a company’s spokesperson told The Verge that it’s currently available for a “small group of YouTube Premium subscribers.”

“1080p Premium is an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p which provides more information per pixel that results in a higher quality viewing experience,” Pennington said. The spokesperson also added that “there are no changes to the existing quality offerings for 1080p (HD) resolution on YouTube.”

If you ever uploaded videos on YouTube, you’re probably aware that YouTube’s compression degrades the quality of all videos, even those uploaded in 4K. Moreover, there are often notable quality differences between the versions of movies and TV shows you can watch on streaming services and the 4K Blu-Ray versions of this same content.

YouTube’s ‘1080p Premium’ quality should use more bandwidth than the regular 1080p quality, though Google isn’t sharing details about the higher bitrate it’s using as part of the experiment. Anyway, streaming high-quality video is costly, and Google is betting that many YouTube users are probably willing to pay for that.

Last fall, Google experimented with making 4K video quality a YouTube Premium perk, but the company backtracked after receiving some backlash. It remains to be seen if this new ‘1080p Premium’ video quality will leave the experimental stage, but let us know in the comments if you think this new option could help to make the $11.99/month YouTube Premium subscription more attractive.