Considering how much it costs, YouTube TV is sometimes beaten by customers for offering only mediocre picture quality. This may vary depending on your location or the specific feed YouTube TV offers you, but if you scan the YouTube TV subreddit, you’ll see picture quality as a common complaint. It wasn’t always like that. Now the company is doing something about it – at least for certain content.
In a post to the aforementioned Reddit community yesterday, YouTube TV shared details of recent (and upcoming) improvements to the app. The change that easily got the most attention was this:
Image quality experiments: We are testing transcoding changes, including an increase in bit rate for live 1080p content in the coming weeks. These are aimed at devices that support the VP9 codec with fast internet connections. If these go well, we plan to make them permanent this summer. More information follows!
Most of YouTube TV’s cable channels are provided to the service by networks in 720p, so that’s the best customers get. But certain channels, including TBS and TNT, offer a 1080i feed that YouTube TV deinterlaces to 1080p. However, when it comes to streaming, bitrate is really the crucial element to make the image look good and reduce compression artifacts, pixelation, blocking, etc., especially in dark scenes. Increasing the bit rate can lead to a substantially better image.
Hulu with Live TV and DirecTV Stream has an edge over YouTube TV in terms of picture quality, but when you factor in YouTube TV’s other benefits like a top-notch DVR and cleaner UX, the difference isn’t necessarily enough to make you switch. Still, if YouTube could level the playing field with those two, it would make a noticeable improvement and perhaps reduce churn. With a monthly subscription now costing more than $70 per month, YouTube needs to keep improving the service steadily if it wants live TV customers to stick around.
I’ve asked YouTube for more details on the upcoming bitrate changes. I am very curious if there will be upgrades for the service’s many 720p networks or, as the post says, these improvements will only apply to 1080p content. The Reddit post also outlines numerous recent bug fixes for the YouTube TV app for Apple TV, with YouTube saying “we’ve narrowed down the primary cause” of audio/video sync issues when surround sound is enabled.
After debuting its multiview feature for March Madness, the company continues to experiment with its presentation ahead of this year’s NFL season. Once that happens, YouTube will start streaming its all-important Sunday Ticket package to football fans willing to shell out a lot for it.