Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG GOOGL YouTube is experimenting with a higher-quality 1080p option — and it may elevate the future of the streaming experience on the platform.
What Happened: Soon after some Redditors noticed a new “1080p Premium” option in YouTube’s quality settings menu, the global video sharing and social media platform confirmed that it is testing to improve the bitrate quality, reported The Verge.
Paul Pennington, a YouTube spokesperson, told the Verge the 1080p Premium option is currently available for limited subscribers. The advanced feature aims to enhance the bitrate version of standard 1080p quality, offering much more “information per pixel.”
In hindsight, the 1080p Premium option will enable users to stream much higher-quality videos. Pennington clarified that, as of now, there are no changes to the existing “quality offerings for 1080p (HD) resolution” on the platform.
YouTube did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comments.
Why It’s Important: Bitrate is an essential factor in improving a video’s quality. It is often described by how much data is used to transfer each second of video.
It’s generally accurate to say that videos encoded with the same codec but with higher bitrate will look better qualitatively — that seems to be the approach YouTube is taking, the report noted.
YouTube is yet to determine the average premium bitrate for the new 1080p Premium option.
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