Say what you will about Google services being free because you’re the product it’s selling to advertisers — at the end of the day, most of us are perfectly willing to sit through some targeted ads so long as they get us access to that sweet, sweet content. But when we hear about that content getting locked behind a paywall, we start getting very nervous — and this was exactly what we recently saw in a test YouTube was conducting, where it restricted 4K video access to paid Premium subscribers. Thankfully, that test has now ended.
YouTube fans were up in arms earlier this month, after a limited number of viewers found themselves roped in to the platform’s latest test. We see YouTube trying out new stuff all the time, either through experiments users can voluntarily opt into, or A/B tests it’s conducting with users at large. This 4K project appears to have been one of the latter, and for viewers involved, 2160p content was marked as restricted to paid Premium users.
Economically, something like that makes enough sense. Streaming platforms like Netflix charge extra for 4K and no one seems to bat an eye, after all. Maybe Google thought it wouldn’t get so much pushback, but after the experiment was publicized, the bad press might have been too much to endure.
Regardless of its reasons, YouTube now confirms that it has “fully turned off this experiment” (via 9to5Google). Now, before we go celebrating that 4K YouTube will be free forever, it’s worth noting that the service only promised that the experiment is over — and that technically leaves the door open for a very much non-experimental, very permanent 4K Premium paywall. And while we haven’t seen any direct evidence for that yet… did we just jinx things?
