Amidst the extra stress on networks which has been caused by the COVID-19 lockdown, YouTube was one of the companies that has taken a decision of reducing the quality of videos in order to curb eventual connectivity outages.
In India, the platform opened videos in 480p on Android as well as iOS devices, but now the option of 1080 p videos is back.
Although it works only when on Wi-Fi, some of the users of YouTube have reported that the feature is again available. The app will still give no better option than SD, or 480p when the connection of the phone is on 4G, .
A user could switch between different type of quality settings as it was always available for all of the users during quarantine, but India got the short end of the stick since the different other options were not even available. To go around the restriction, many users have resorted to using VPN services in other , while others users stuck to their Android TV which did not even apply the 480p rule.
In case you fail to have access to a stable WiFi connection and you wish to stream at 1080p on mobile data, there’s a simple workaround. You’ll still need to have access to a temporary WiFi connection for it to work. You’ll need to connect your device to WiFi and then open a video on YouTube to stream videos at 1080p on mobile data. From the WiFi network, you can then disconnect your device and switch to 1080p quality. Without any issues, the video should stream at 1080p on mobile data . One must also note that 1080p streaming, and the aforementioned workaround, do not work with mobile hotspots.