While YouTube offers a viewing resolution of up to 8K (7680p), 1080p Full HD has to be the go-to choice for most. Furthermore, most smartphones come with a 1080p display and it wouldn’t make sense to play a 1440p/2160p video on YouTube. Hence, we’re glad that YouTube has added an improved version of 1080p Full HD to its videos. And here’s everything you need to know about it.
What is ‘1080p Premium Enhance Bitrate’ on YouTube
Simply put, YouTube is offering an improved version of 1080p on its service. The improvement comes in the form of an enhanced bitrate. Now, you might be thinking, what is a bitrate on video and how does it matter? While the resolution of a video implies the number of pixels present in a frame of a video, other factors play a key role in the video quality. One of these is called a bitrate. Bitrate is defined as the number of bits transmitted between a source and destination in a second. In the case of a video, it is the total video data in bits transmitted per second to you by YouTube.
1080p vs. 1080p Premium: What Is the Difference
The faster the speed of data transfer, the better the quality of the video. A 1080p video with a high bitrate can often outperform the quality of a 4K video with a relatively slower bitrate. You might have already come across different formats of 1080p – such as 1080p Blu-Ray which streams at a bitrate of 40Mbps. For reference, most YouTube videos play at a bitrate of 8-10Mbps. In its official documentation, YouTube claims that 1080p Premium offers a ‘crispier and better looking’ video quality with 1080p Premium. But beyond such adjectives, we get no further information regarding the details of the enhanced bitrate. However, we observed a slight increase in the video quality between 1080p and 1080p Premium with Enhanced Bitrate on YouTube. Next, let us take a look at what you need to access this new feature from YouTube.
Requirements for Youtube 1080p Premium
An increase in the speed of data transfer means an increase in the cost for YouTube. Therefore, YouTube wants you to pay to access the feature. Hence, this feature is available only for YouTube Premium subscribers. Further, the feature is dubbed as an ‘experiment’ as of now and is available only on the YouTube app for iPhone. However, YouTube has mentioned that the feature will come soon to the web version of YouTube but there is no news regarding when the feature will be available on Android. So, there you go, an iPhone and a Premium Subscription for YouTube is what you need to use the 1080p Premium feature. If you have access to both of it, here’s how you can enable it on videos.
Enable 1080p Premium Video Quality on YouTube on iPhone
There’s nothing new that you need to do to enable 1080p Premium on YouTube videos. It comes in the same quality options menu as the rest of the resolutions. However, it isn’t available on all videos as of now; only a few videos come with 1080p Premium resolution. The only way to find out if a video supports it is to check the video quality settings. Here’s how you can do it: Step 1: Open YouTube on your iPhone. Step 2: Play the video you want to try the feature on. Step 3: Tap on the video and tap on the Settings icon. Select Quality. Step 4: Select Advanced. Step 5: Now, select the 1080p Premium option. There you go – the video will play on the Full HD resolution along with an enhanced bitrate. If you are having any issues selecting the quality, read our article to fix the YouTube quality unavailable issue.
Enjoy Enhanced Quality Videos
While the feature seems to be in its testing phase, we appreciate YouTube’s intent behind this. It looks like a push for customers to buy the Premium subscription. However, since we already use YouTube Premium, these features are a good bonus. And given the fact that we bought the subscription to evade ads, more features are always good! The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
