YouTube SHOULD charge for 4K. Hear me out.

[DarkSwordsman]

8 hours ago, Spotty said:

Seems reasonable to me. I'm surprised Youtube did not do it sooner. I normally watch youtube videos in 4k purely for the bitrate benefit but it wouldn't be a huge loss to me if I could only watch in 1440p.

I do agree, since 1440p at least forces VP9 for smaller accounts and has a better bitrate. I'd be happy if they leave that option open, especially as someone that uploads an occassional video and would prefer to have the clarity. But it's still mind blowing that YouTube manages to make their 1080p30 look worse than what most people can achieve on Twitch at 720p60 with source quality. Like genuinely, it gets so blocky in some scenarios that it just looks like a soft blocky mess, worse than what I can manage to do with 540p or even 360p on ffmpeg.

Edit: By the way, at 11:55 with the stats for nerds, it should be noted that while, yes, the connection speed went up, even 4K YouTube is often less than 15-20 Mbps.

Spoiler

Edit 2: Oh yeah, one other thing: I do think YouTube should consider 10-bit video. A common trick in the anime encoding scene is to encode into 10 bit video even if the source is not 10 bit. This is often because they run filters through Vapoursynth and want to maintain as much quality as possible.

10 bit video, even on an 8 bit display, has the added benefit of barely taking any more space while reducing banding and some other artifacts, since it can store more detailed data (on 0-1023 versus 0-255 for each pixel).

 

Another thing: I simply don't understand why video still uses 4:2:0 chroma subsampling beyond a hardware limitation that was created due to a common spec/assumption. The only argument I've seen for it's existence is that it uses less data, but having encoded both a 4:2:0 8 bit and 4:4:4 10-bit (or even 12-bit with H265) video with the same settings, the sizes are not that much different. Plus 4:4:4 would have the benefit of utilizing the full color range so the colors would be more accurate, there would be less banding, and even less artifacts in darker scenes where those extra colors would make all the difference.

[lfcmedia]

Here's a new idea,

How about creator's who make millions, they pay for their own videos to be on there?

How many Gb's does LTT take up on YouTube? How many views do old videos get?

How about if a creator wants to keep 1,000's of videos on their channel, they pay for video storage for older videos. No one is watching old videos, because they don't come up in the search algorithm, so dump them.

No one watches TV shows from the 50's and 60's, so why store them? Or why should YouTube store them?

If you want to keep them available, host them on your own website, or pay YouTube.

As a user I shouldn't have to pay for LTT to make money off me. Dump all the videos with no views for over 3 years and I imagine you could halve YouTubes storage needs.

Linus didn't say how much creators will get of the subscription fee paid to watch 4k, and with that being an essential aspect of the argument to know if he is bias, it should be made clear. What if he gets 50% of subscription fees? Then it would be in his interest to argue for the paywall. If he doesn't I can listen to his argument without the feeling I am being advertised to.

[DarkSwordsman]

19 hours ago, LapsedMemory said:

I have never seen any content on YouTube or floatplane that has made me think "Gee, this is great content, but the 1080p resolution sucks.  It would be SO much better in 4k"

 

I'd rather them charge for 4k and keep the ad count lower on the free tier than continue to offer 4k but turning YouTube into broadcast TV levels of advertisements.  

While I agree with your second part, I always notice how terrible 1080p looks even on a phone. The difference between 1080p and 1440p is astonishing.

[yolosnail]

3 hours ago, lfcmedia said:

How about creator's who make millions, they pay for their own videos to be on there?

That's what the 45% cut is for

[Temple]

4 hours ago, lfcmedia said:

 

As a user I shouldn't have to pay for LTT to make money off me. Dump all the videos with no views for over 3 years and I imagine you could halve YouTubes storage needs.

Linus didn't say how much creators will get of the subscription fee paid to watch 4k, and with that being an essential aspect of the argument to know if he is bias, it should be made clear. What if he gets 50% of subscription fees? Then it would be in his interest to argue for the paywall. If he doesn't I can listen to his argument without the feeling I am being advertised to.

Firstly, I believe with the whole "adblock = privateering" conversation during the WAN show a while ago Linus mentioned that you already do pay for your consumption of YouTube, at least if you don't block ads . The transaction is: You watch ads before/during/after the video, whose ad spot is purchased by an agency or company from YouTube, and then the proceeds from the purchase of that ad spot get split between the creator and YouTube. YouTube Premium is essentially just paying the money that would've come from those ad spots (and more) from your own pocket, bypassing that step, and thus directly going into the pockets of YouTube and the creator.

So, essentially since Premium accounts are a more profitable income stream than ad-supported accounts, they moved a feature that the majority of users didn't care about from their ad-supported tier to their premium tier to try and get more users to move to the more profitable tier for them, and remove a huge money sink called 4K bandwidth costs in the process. 

 

4 hours ago, lfcmedia said:

How about creator's who make millions, they pay for their own videos to be on there?

How many Gb's does LTT take up on YouTube? How many views do old videos get?

How about if a creator wants to keep 1,000's of videos on their channel, they pay for video storage for older videos. No one is watching old videos, because they don't come up in the search algorithm, so dump them.

No one watches TV shows from the 50's and 60's, so why store them? Or why should YouTube store them?

If you want to keep them available, host them on your own website, or pay YouTube.

Anyways, doing this would also remove the vast majority of older videos from smaller creators, who can't (or don't want to) pay to keep up their back catalogue of videos, and doing this would impact one of the truly useful points about YouTube: the enormous amount of guides, lessons, and other such educational content present on the platform.

What if you were trying to use some niche program for your job, but can't find a specific feature? Their website is long dead, the app itself is poorly documented, and so you Google it, and a video comes out from some random channel 7 years ago whose topic is exactly what you were trying to find. 

The removal of such old videos would prevent that from happening to any user on the platform. 

 

I personally believe that the removal of old videos is a rather radical solution to this problem, and erases one of the founding tenets of YouTube: the ability to find any (public, undeleted) video ever posted to the website. 

I remember an anecdote I heard from an EmpLemon video (one of the ones on copyright) (take w/ a hefty grain of salt): One of the founders of YouTube once said that he made the website because he couldn't find a specific clip from a TV show, so he made a platform where such things could be posted and searched for easily.

 

Also, as @yolosnailmentioned, there is a 45% cut to YouTube for the express purpose of maintaining (and expanding) the site. Why should the creators pay more out of their paychecks to do the job that YouTube already said that they were going to do? 

 

With all that criticism being said, I could definitely come around to the idea of some kind of payment from the creators in order to subsidize the bandwidth their channel generates, but it would have to come with some real, legitimately useful features along with the payment to make it anywhere near feasible, and I just don't see Google doing that. 

 

Anyways, as before, blah blah I'm not a professional, yadda yadda all my own somewhat uninformed opinion.

Edited October 20, 2022 by Temple
edit: technicalities

[Ubersonic]

While I think this is total dog ---- move by YouTube, I have to say, something that would make it go down a LOT easier would be if they offered a 4K only option for £1-2 a month.

 

That would still suck but it would be a LOT more eatable than paying £144 ($162 US) a year for Red/Premium just to watch YouTube in 4K, especially when the cost of 4K TVs/monitors are dropping under £200 for basic ones.  If this ---- goes through there will be people out there whose YouTube 4K payments are higher than the payments on their 4K TV lol.

[Temple]

Just saw this on reddit, felt like I had to add this here.

Apparently, Google has decided that immediately after moving a feature from ad-supported to paid, they should also increase the price of Premium.

Just found this pretty comedic timing and relevant.

 

I stand by my previous takes, but this move feels way scummier to me than what they've done up to this point. 

The only reasons I can think of to do this is 1) to further subsidize the 4K bandwidth/storage issues, or 2) to take advantage of the (admittedly minor) influx of users who are willing to pay for premium to stream 4K video. I'm not too peeved by it, since I'm not a premium user, but it's just way less cool to screw with your subscribed customers.

Because of the first reason, from a business perspective, I can understand it, but even then, I would've at least spaced out the changes a bit more. Like maybe do a Premium price increase, and then move 4K to premium? IDK.

[YellowJersey]

TBH, I'm with Linus on this one.

[Neroon]

9 hours ago, Temple said:

Just saw this on reddit, felt like I had to add this here.

 

Apparently, Google has decided that immediately after moving a feature from ad-supported to paid, they should also increase the price of Premium.

Just found this pretty comedic timing and relevant.

 

I stand by my previous takes, but this move feels way scummier to me than what they've done up to this point. 

The only reasons I can think of to do this is 1) to further subsidize the 4K bandwidth/storage issues, or 2) to take advantage of the (admittedly minor) influx of users who are willing to pay for premium to stream 4K video. I'm not too peeved by it, since I'm not a premium user, but it's just way less cool to screw with your subscribed customers.

Because of the first reason, from a business perspective, I can understand it, but even then, I would've at least spaced out the changes a bit more. Like maybe do a Premium price increase, and then move 4K to premium? IDK.

Yeah just saw the news article about it. This is a very different approach. I get them wanting to put 4K behind a paywall, that's understandable, but while moving a free feature behind a paywall, and then increase the price of the paywall, that's just showing you don't give a fuck and you figured you can get away with anything.

[Lightwreather]

11 hours ago, Temple said:

Apparently, Google has decided that immediately after moving a feature from ad-supported to paid, they should also increase the price of Premium.

It should be noted: This is only for the FAMILY plan. Family. It seems that the personal plans remain the same price.

[Akira1364]

If anything YouTube should charge to upload 4K, not view it. For example, Discord users without Nitro are capped at a max upload size of 25MB, while the two paid Nitro tiers look like the image I've attached in terms of their respective upload limits. Downloading (or viewing) files has no limits placed on it, of course. 

 

Imagine how silly it would be though if instead of that anyone could upload files up to 500MB in size willy-nilly, but only those paying $9.99 a month could download or view them!

 

[Imglidinhere]

On 10/19/2022 at 4:21 PM, Stea1th said:

Why is Linus white knighting for google? 

Why aren't you watching the video to the end before commenting?

[Temple]

6 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

It should be noted: This is only for the FAMILY plan. Family. It seems that the personal plans remain the same price.

I didn't realize that, thanks. It's still pretty scummy though, imo. 

[Spindel]

@James maybe do a more in depth video how useless 4K is in most circumstances to complement this video.

 

For most livingrooms TV setups above 1080p is a waste, heck I would argue that at a reasonable bitrate watching movies and videos 720p is hard to distinguish from 1080p unless you are really looking for it and in that case you’ve stopped focusing enjoying the movie you watch. HDR is a better investment for most normal peoples livingrooms. I say this having ”only” a HDR500 capable TV, but even with my ”lacking” TV there is a clear benefit with the dynamic range and most important the increased colour depth.

 

In my experience 4K is only ”worth” it with computer monitors since you sit much closer since to a computer monitor (and for me personally 1440p is enough at 27” screen sizes).

 

So yeah I agree with the premise of this video, main thing that this video didn’t really cover that much is that YT (and other streaming platforms) should maybe increase the bit rate for lover resolution videos. Most lower resolution videos on YT look bad not because of the resolution but because the absolutley knee capped bit rate. Even when upping the bit rate at 720p would save a lot of bandwidth compared to 4K without making 720p looking like ass.

[Just that Mario]

Linus makes video about how YT charging for services that cost them money is fine (and it is). Meanwhile when a product supplier is raising the subscription cost to non-essential service, Linus is about to riot on the streets about how they dare raising the price on their product! Talk about ignorant Karen thoughts...

[Just that Mario]

On 10/21/2022 at 2:42 AM, Temple said:

Just saw this on reddit, felt like I had to add this here.

Apparently, Google has decided that immediately after moving a feature from ad-supported to paid, they should also increase the price of Premium.

Just found this pretty comedic timing and relevant.

 

I stand by my previous takes, but this move feels way scummier to me than what they've done up to this point. 

The only reasons I can think of to do this is 1) to further subsidize the 4K bandwidth/storage issues, or 2) to take advantage of the (admittedly minor) influx of users who are willing to pay for premium to stream 4K video. I'm not too peeved by it, since I'm not a premium user, but it's just way less cool to screw with your subscribed customers.

Because of the first reason, from a business perspective, I can understand it, but even then, I would've at least spaced out the changes a bit more. Like maybe do a Premium price increase, and then move 4K to premium? IDK.

You seriously cannot expect subscription costs to not increase over time.

[Dutch_Master]

On 10/21/2022 at 5:39 PM, Akira1364 said:

If anything YouTube should charge to upload 4K, not view it.

This. Charge the maker of 4k content, (s)he is the one who's data YT is storing. If they don't want to be charged for storing their video archive, don't upload in 4k or higher. As said, for the vast majority of viewers/subscribers/money-generators, 720p or 1080p suffices, the real diehards will want 1440p, there's very few folk who can actually spot the difference between 4k and 1440p on a generic monitor/TV.

 

Mind, any non-video data someone wants to store "in the cloud" will be charged mucho $$$$$ for the size of a 4k video file!

[Temple]

17 hours ago, Just that Mario said:

You seriously cannot expect subscription costs to not increase over time.

It's not that I disagree with the price increase, I mentioned before that it's a perfectly understandable business decision. I'm annoyed at the timing. It makes it appear as if they are raising prices directly to take advantage of users who are switching to Premium for 4K. My head has cooled a bit since my knee-jerk post here, and I'm not as annoyed anymore, as I now believe that it was a simple coincidence, or perhaps they are making the (perfectly logical) decision to add a bit to the price of Premium to subsidize 4K-related costs. But it still feels like they're bending over customers who just found out they will have to pay MORE for the same service they've been using, just for 4K, and that isn't exactly cool, in my opinion. I think @Ubersonichas a potentially good solution for this: add a subscription that only gives access to 4K-related features, and leave Premium out of it. Maybe make them separate services, like ad-free is one service, 4K/high-quality streaming is another one, and you can subscribe to both concurrently? IDK, I'm a CS student so it's out of my depth to propose solutions to stuff like this. I'm just writing my reactions here.

8 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

This. Charge the maker of 4k content, (s)he is the one who's data YT is storing. If they don't want to be charged for storing their video archive, don't upload in 4k or higher. As said, for the vast majority of viewers/subscribers/money-generators, 720p or 1080p suffices, the real diehards will want 1440p, there's very few folk who can actually spot the difference between 4k and 1440p on a generic monitor/TV.

 

Mind, any non-video data someone wants to store "in the cloud" will be charged mucho $$$$$ for the size of a 4k video file!

This is a good potential solution, and I personally feel like it'll be one of the more attractive solutions to Google. I don't exactly love it myself (I mentioned myself that I have a distaste for making the creators pay for services), but since (as prev. mentioned) only a small minority of users actually care about any resolution quality above 1080p, it's a quality that only generally matters when a creator is targeting a large audience which has a high relative percentage of "users who care," or creators who themselves care about the resolution of their content.

However, I feel the need to mention that it's not really about data storage (on the creator's end) when talking about YouTube. You're comparing YouTube to something like OneDrive or Google Drive, e.g. cloud storage solutions, when that's not the use YouTube is designed for. I personally think that YouTube is more akin to a social media platform, like Reddit, Twitter, or Instagram, except the user-generated content on YouTube is constrained almost always to video. Do you think it would be fair for the users to pay for Instagram "storing" their posts? It would be negligible compared to YouTube, but the point I'm trying to make is still there. In that sense, it's very important to keep the payment for service in YouTube strictly to features that most users don't care about, e.g. 4K, high bitrate, etc. and/or to services that are strictly quality-of-life e.g. ad-free content, or else it could (worst case scenario) quickly snowball to a subscription service for creators to post on the platform at all, which is bad for obvious reasons.

 

I'm just a CS student though, so these are just my opinion.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Temple
edit: some italicization stuff for clarity

[Neroon]

On 10/22/2022 at 2:52 PM, Just that Mario said:

Linus makes video about how YT charging for services that cost them money is fine (and it is). Meanwhile when a product supplier is raising the subscription cost to non-essential service, Linus is about to riot on the streets about how they dare raising the price on their product! Talk about ignorant Karen thoughts...

You want to back up that argument with examples where he did that?

[IkeaGnome]

14 hours ago, Temple said:

raising prices directly to take advantage of users who are switching to Premium for 4K. My head has cooled a bit since my knee-jerk post here, and I'm not as annoyed anymore, as I now believe that it was a simple coincidence, or perhaps they are making the (perfectly logical) decision to add a bit to the price of Premium to subsidize 4K-related costs.

I’m not trying to work you back up here. Promise. Just spitballing ideas. 
I wonder if it’s not coincidental. They know who watches what. I’d be interested to see if people on the family plan are a disproportionate majority of 4k viewers. Really it would make some sense. How many people watch on a 4k monitor compared to how many families have a 4k tv in their living room. A good portion of my viewing is 4k. I watch mostly on my phone or 1440p monitor, but my tv is 4k. Before I go to bed I start a video more often than not and it just runs all night long. That’s another part that won’t happen so much to primary PC viewers. Idle viewership. I don’t have the family plan, but we’re looking at swapping to family plan to merge 2 subs into one. 

[Temple]

6 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

I’m not trying to work you back up here. Promise. Just spitballing ideas. 
I wonder if it’s not coincidental. They know who watches what. I’d be interested to see if people on the family plan are a disproportionate majority of 4k viewers. Really it would make some sense. How many people watch on a 4k monitor compared to how many families have a 4k tv in their living room. A good portion of my viewing is 4k. I watch mostly on my phone or 1440p monitor, but my tv is 4k. Before I go to bed I start a video more often than not and it just runs all night long. That’s another part that won’t happen so much to primary PC viewers. Idle viewership. I don’t have the family plan, but we’re looking at swapping to family plan to merge 2 subs into one. 

If i'm being 100% honest, it wouldn't surprise me. We're talking about Google, after all. I did mention that they might be making the reasonable decision to add more the the cost of a certain premium subscription to subsidize 4K, and I think this is the most likely solution, but I also think there is a very real possibility that Google wanted to increase a subscription cost just to reap the benefits of users switching to Premium for 4K, and that does make me a little annoyed, but at the same time, I feel like even if that was the reason, what were we expecting from Google? 

 

Either way, I'm not really gonna get too peeved about it. As I said in my first post in this thread: "If it kicks the 'YouTube's plug getting pulled' can down the road for half a decade, why should we be complaining about it?"

 

... Though it did piss me off a little bit when I first read it.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Temple
edit: technicalities

[Akira1364]

On 10/22/2022 at 5:36 PM, Dutch_Master said:

This. Charge the maker of 4k content, (s)he is the one who's data YT is storing. If they don't want to be charged for storing their video archive, don't upload in 4k or higher. As said, for the vast majority of viewers/subscribers/money-generators, 720p or 1080p suffices, the real diehards will want 1440p, there's very few folk who can actually spot the difference between 4k and 1440p on a generic monitor/TV.

 

Mind, any non-video data someone wants to store "in the cloud" will be charged mucho $$$$$ for the size of a 4k video file!

I mean the problem with YouTube specifically is their embarrassingly terrible compression that makes 1080P look nowhere close to as good as running say a game at 1080P. I have a 1080P monitor but do always play back at the highest res possible to work around that.

[dogwitch]

46 minutes ago, Akira1364 said:

I mean the problem with YouTube specifically is their embarrassingly terrible compression that makes 1080P look nowhere close to as good as running say a game at 1080P. I have a 1080P monitor but do always play back at the highest res possible to work around that.

oh yeah. i did a test using normal compression video. every rez look better then yt one.

[SmittyShmee]

Logan put out a counterpoint:

 

[Bramimond]

I never watch in 4K because it takes too long to download and it's not my internet connection, which is blazingly fast.

 

Really though, I'd watch all videos in 576p if they did a proper job encoding. The difference between a great 576p rip and one in 1080p is as hard to spot as the difference between art created by humans and by AI. Definitely possible if you look closely, but hardly noticeable when watching a video. And the further you sit away or the smaller your screen is the tougher it becomes.

 

 

The problem is that most people are bad at encoding, which to be honest is a bit like arcane magic and an art in itself. Simply cranking the resolution is something everyone can do with little effort and you get a bigger number for the marketing department.

 

It's so bad, I bet most people have never even had the opportunity to watch a good 576p rip, so I'll leave an example. It's even an unfair example, since the 1080p version got a  restoration while the 576p version had to work with an old master. The 576p version also came out nearly a decade earlier.

 

Try to figure out which version is which without looking at the resolution:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, I can tell these apart at a glance and chances are so can you. But if you see this in motion the difference isn't exactly day and night and if it wasn't for the fact that the 1080p version worked on a different master it would be even harder. I'd even say that in the frame with less detail the 576p looks slightly better even though the text isn't as sharp.