YouTube with better quality, with the new 1080p Premium that some users already have

Although YouTube is the most popular video service on the planet, this does not mean that it is the one with the best image quality, quite the c ontrary; it is thanks to the fact that it maintains a balance between quality and file size that its servers can store millions of new videos every day.

[La solución a los vídeos borrosos en YouTube ya está en Chrome y usa Inteligencia Artificial]

Even if you are looking for the best video quality and using 4K resolution for videos available on YouTube, you are unlikely to get the most out of your new TV screen. Now the company can change its policy with a new level of image quality: 1080p Premium.

Why 1080p may be better than 4K on YouTube

Some Reddit users have found that they can now change the video resolution to the new “1080p Premium” option. It appears as an option if we click on the video gear icon and change the resolution, and it replaces the 4K resolution.

You might think none of this makes sense. How is it possible that a video at 1080p resolution has better image quality than a 4K video? The key lies in an often overlooked factor: el bitrate, o bunch of bits.

Bit rate is the amount of data transmitted when we play a video, and it directly affects the quality of picture and sound. The higher the bit rate, the sharper the image and the clearer the sound, even if the resolution is the same. A video at 1080p resolution can have a low bitrate to save on the amount of data used, and this is one of the reasons why YouTube consumes less internet data than other video apps.

The bad thing, of course, is that the experience is affected if we drop the bitrate too much; some of the symptoms of low bitrate are a blurry image or visual artifacts such as “blocks”

. Both are issues we often encounter on YouTube, and for which the company has been criticized; In fact, it is always advisable to use 4K resolution even if we do not have a screen with such a resolution, due to the increase in bitrate that accompanies it.

The new 1080p Premium option can solve this problem by displaying video at 1080p resolution but at a much higher bitrate. If high enough, it could be better than 4K for image quality, although that remains to be seen. Also, as the name suggests, the option would be exclusive to YouTube Premium users.