What you need to know
- Following an increase in demand in late March, YouTube had disabled video content above 480p in India.
- The option to stream higher-quality videos is now back on the company's mobile apps, according to Indian users.
- Those on mobile data, however, are still stuck on 480p.
Back in March, following a massive uptick in demand as a result of the stay-at-home orders resulting from the pandemic, YouTube, as well as many other internet services, decided to take precautionary measures to reduce the strain on their infrastructure. In YouTube's case, that meant changing the default video quality to 480p the world over.
Indian users, however, were met with even more stringent measures. While in other countries could choose to change the video quality to a higher setting, in India, all settings above 480p were disabled entirely. As PocketNow reports, Indian users have now started seeing the option to view videos in 1080p once again.
The change is seemingly still not live nationwide, however, so it would seem that Google is only gradually making higher-quality videos available again. Additionally, only users on a Wi-Fi network will have access to higher quality videos; those on mobile data are still capped at 480p, presumably in a bid to prevent mobile carriers' systems from becoming too congested. And as before, the default quality is still 480p.
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