This Monday (17th), the Google confirmed that it is no longer testing the feature that limited the 4K resolution of videos to YouTube Premium subscribers only. The function was highly criticized by users earlier this month, and now, according to the company, the “experiment” is “completely disabled”.
Although there is no concrete information about the real reason, it is believed that the poor reception of users may have contributed strongly to the “shutdown” of the test.
In a post on Twitter, YouTube limited itself to saying only that “viewers should now be able to access 4K quality resolutions without a Premium subscription”, meaning you don’t have to pay anything else to watch videos in 2160p.
Accordingly as TechCrunchGoogle wanted, precisely, to evaluate the reactions of users when making this specific function available only to some paying and non-paying service.
In a deleted tweetYouTube told a user who received the alert to upgrade their subscription that it was “part of an experiment to better understand the feature preferences of Premium and non-Premium viewers.”
The end of that test, however, doesn’t mean that YouTube won’t consider restricting the 4K quality of videos to Premium subscribers only in the near future. For now, everything remains as it always was.
Proof of this are the numbers of dislikes in videos. the platform started hiding them just as a test and, months later, announced that the feature would be implemented by default — even though it was not well received by users.
There’s no way to know if the Mountain View giant faces low membership on YouTube’s paid plan, which costs BRL 20.90 in Brazil. So maybe it plans exclusive features in the future to get more subscribers to the service.
Testing of up to 10 consecutive ads has also been completed
Last month, some unpaid YouTube users started complaining on social media that they were viewing up to five ads of six seconds to watch some videos.
After a few days, more complaints began to pop up on social media. However, people were seeing up to ten advertisements that could not be skipped.
On a Reddit forum, one user wrote: “I took ten [propagandas] on my Roku. Five minutes of video later, I took nine more.”
to the website PCMag, Google apologized for the bad experience and confirmed that the “small global experiment” had been completed. For the company, the tests aimed to “create a better experience for viewers by reducing commercial breaks”.
With information: TechCrunch and 9to5Google
https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/2022/10/18/youtube-confirma-fim-do-teste-que-limitava-resolucao-4k-para-assinantes-premium/