Unlock YouTube’s New Feature – But Only If You Pay!

YouTube is starting to encourage more people to sign up for its premium version, and there’s a new reason why many of you might consider paying for the platform. YouTube Premium users will get a new video quality feature that is claimed to improve the viewing experience on mobile, web and even smart TVs.

Called the Premium-only feature, the enhanced bitrate 1080p video resolution is now available as an option in YouTube’s Android app and settings on TVs.

YouTube first offered the video quality feature to iOS users earlier this year, and this week it has expanded its compatibility to other platforms as well. The company explains that the new bitrate feature improves the viewing experience on YouTube if you pay for its Premium service.

Quality can be hard to tell with the naked eye, but something YouTube says works as advertised. It also notes that the new resolution will be automatically applied based on the internet speeds available in your home or office. You can manually go to any video’s settings (wheel icon) and change the resolution. To be fair, we had a chance to test the new enhanced resolution and honestly couldn’t see much of a difference between the platform’s standard 1080p and enhanced 1080p video quality.

As we said, YouTube forces more people to pay for their service or watch videos with ads when using the free version. The platform has even started banning users who allow ad blockers to bypass these ads. People have been getting a pop-up message asking them to unblock ads so YouTube can pay creators.

The platform also gives users three options to stop blocking ads or else their account will be locked and they won’t be able to watch videos on YouTube. The company is likely to have it easy in most countries, but it faces data protection challenges in the EU, where tech companies have been criticized for similar actions in the past.