Google may soon limit 4K videos only to YouTube premium uses – Times of India

Youtube offers its standard premium subscription for Indian users at Rs 129 per month. With the premium subscription, users can get ad-free videos and background playback. YouTube’s premium subscription also allows users to download videos for offline viewing. Now, the Google-owned video streaming platform is reportedly planning to make watching 4K videos an exclusive only for the paying Premium members. Some Youtube users have reported this new change via Reddit and Twitter posts. However, this change doesn’t seem to be appearing for all users as YouTube might be testing the waters before implementing this change for every user.
4K videos only for YouTube Premium users
Some YouTube users who access the video-sharing platform through their iPhones have shared screenshots on Reddit and Twitter which show the new change. Meanwhile, this change is also likely to appear for users accessing YouTube on other platforms.
A Twitter user with the account name @sondesix has shared a screenshot (spotted by MacRumours) where the 2160p (4K) video quality option started appearing with a message that said “Premium” and recommended users to tap on the video quality to subscribe for YouTube Premium.

This new change started to appear after Youtube tested 12 back-to-back ads for non-Premium users. As mentioned above, the 4K quality option is showing blocked for a few users and YouTube has shared no official information that states their plans to move forward with the change.
In September 2021, YouTube claimed to have a combined subscriber base of 50 million users which included both Premium and Music subscriptions. For reference, another rival paid media service — Spotify Premium — had over 188 million users in Q2 2022 and Netflix has over 220.7 million paid customers.
By locking the 4K videos for non-Premium users Youtube can boost Premium sign-ups and make this service a bigger revenue source for Google. The tech giant recently decided to end its gaming service Stadia in January 2023 and extra revenue from another service can be helpful for the company to mitigate its losses.