I mean, this is quite fine in my opinion. 1080p is plenty of quality, and if you can afford a 4k display you can probably pony up for youtube premium. 4k is pretty much a "premium" content resolution anyway.
A counterpoint to this is that as someone notes: Do you really need 4K on a phone?<p>I've always thought that just as a matter of "manners" one should attempt to use as little of a limited resource as possible - especially when using perhaps internet or worse, cellular data or radio spectrum.<p>Back when Google did the whole "we will set the default resolution lower" thing at the beginning of the pandemic, were YouTube users en masse pissed off at the lower quality, or did they even notice? I would argue that most people would not be scrutinizing the video, especially if they were not full screened, at which point the resolution may as well be wasted.<p>I'm not necessarily defending paywalling the feature, but I do think there is validity into pushing users into a lower qulity funnel for reasons beyond simple greed.<p>On the other hand, I watch most of the videos I watch in windowed theater mode in 1440p on my 4K screen. I find that 1440p is the best quality that does not cause frequent seeking in the video to lag, and I tend to do this a lot to skip for example, sponsor segments and other "fluff” manually. I'm on fiber internet, so it's probably got something to do with either YouTube or my computer's video decode pipeline
Considering 4k screens will only become <i>more</i> popular as the screens on pretty much everything progress foward this feels hilariously shortsighted. Also the optics of it are terrible, any customer that ever even considers resolution at any point of their app usage will feel burnt by this new gate put in front of them. Resolution was not a "premium" feature yesterday or 5 years before then, and the framing of premium implies that it's features should be "icing on the cake" of the base service, so to speak. This is just artificial and stupid. All this does is reopen old wounds about the lack of background playback. What a terrible move for a platform that already has subterranean PR and is merely "tolerated" by most of its end users.<p>Why not just put a a full width banner at the top of the website calling anyone with the gall not to pay for premium a second class citizen? They're gonna pitch a shit fit anyway, might as well hasten the process.
To me this looks like a desperate move by YT to increase profitability. The problem is that YT has forgotten the elephant in the room.<p>YT's censorship of certain political content needs to stop, but they instead remove the "Dislike" counts.<p>YT's search is broken and everyone knows it, but they instead focus on making it even harder to consume quality content at high-resolution (like this link suggests).<p>They took a great idea and turned it into a giant cesspool with some gold here and there. No wonder people don't want to go Premium.