YouTube had been testing a feature with a small number of users, where only YouTube Premium subscribers could play 4K videos – making 4K YouTube videos unavailable for free users.
The testing has been put on to the small sect recently; however, if we talk about YouTube’s relationship with 4K videos – it’s old and beautiful. Popular video sharing platform has supported 4K videos since 2010, or simply for 12 years. It should be noted that 4K videos weren’t very popular at that time or streaming 4K videos wasn’t a common occurrence. Fast forward to 2015, the platform had introduced as high as 8K videos and the best part of all these high-res videos was it was available for free to all the users.
Therefore, summing up what YouTube had offered since always – putting 4K videos as a Premium subscription feature doesn’t look appealing to many as seen on Twitter. Multiple users have been criticising the idea to implement this. On one such of the tweets criticising YouTube, the social media giant replied from its official account, “fully turned off this experiment.”
“we’ve fully turned off this experiment. viewers should now be able to access 4K quality resolutions without Premium membership. we’re here if you have other q’s,” writes Team YouTube in a reply on Twitter.
While the test was being done, YouTube had added a restriction which wouldn’t let users switch to 4K videos, it would require a Premium subscription to watch them.
YouTube is generally a free video streaming or sharing platform. There are certain perks which comes along with YouTube Premium subscription – it removes ads and also lets users play videos in background and download videos as well. YouTube subscription in India starts at Rs 129 per month.
