this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I'll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?
So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I'll continue to enjoy getting swindled.
I didn't know that you also get higher bitrate with premium. That might change things for me. Most of the time I watch YouTube on a desktop where I can use uBlock but when I watch on my iPad the ads get really annoying and I have already thought about getting premium just to get rid of the ads while watching videos during breakfast. Having higher bitrate would be a nice bonus.
Eh, I'm not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you'd have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement -- youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.
On the other hand, ads suck. I'd have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.
What I find most annoying is that it's still not possible to get Premium Lite (Premium without music, offline and background play) because I already have Spotify and don't really need background and offline play. 12 EUR/month is a steep price for just removing ads.
Fair enough, you need to look out for you. If the money would be missed, don't pay the bridge troll. Block ads and be free.
FWIW: YouTube Red was basically what you're asking for and it cost the equivalent of 9 EUR/month. Red wasn't available in Europe so this is a moot point, but that's the rate that YouTube previously valued itself at as a standalone product if you're curious.
They had a pilot project in benelux and nordic countries called Premium Lite for 6,99 EUR/month
Oh! I'd never heard of Premium Lite so I thought you were speaking hypothetically. TIL.
Yeah, that is a lot lower. If they offered that option I'd definitely use it over the $12 one... but I suppose that explains why the pilot never took off, eh?
Probably, such a shame really
If you watch YouTube videos on a small smartphone screen, sure, the bitrate does not matter that much. But whenever I watch it on my 55" 4k TV I cringe every time the image gets a bit busy and suddenly there are blocking artifacts everywhere