Just last month, we saw reports of YouTube testing adding unreasonably high numbers of unskippable ads on videos, going as far as double digits in some cases. Now, it looks like the video streaming platform has a new experiment: locking 4K videos behind a premium subscription.
Over the past month, a couple of users have seen the option to stream 4K videos be locked behind a premium subscription. There are at least two Reddit threads on the matter, showing two different videos that have the option locked behind a paywall.
![YouTube May Limit 4K To Premium Users Soon 2 YouTube 4K Premium](https://www.lowyat.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/YouTube-4K-Premium-2.jpg)
For what it’s worth, we can still watch videos in 4K for free, be it on desktop or mobile, signed in or incognito, even on the same videos as the Reddit post. This suggests that the locking of 4K behind premium is, like the egregious number of ads from before, a limited run test for a small subset of users. Which still doesn’t bode well should this get rolled out to everyone in the future.
Had the option to stream videos in 4K not been there before, YouTube may have been able to get away with it. But because it has been a free option for just shy of a decade, suddenly making it a premium-only privilege just leaves a bad taste. Rather than making premium sound like a good deal, it may just have the opposite effect.
(Source: Reddit [1], [2] via Neowin, 9to5Google)
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