Its not worth it. You don't watch YouTube videos for the fancy graphics, you listen to it for the commentary with some visual guides. 480p is more than enough for most

You might not, but there’s a ton of great content where the quality is very noticeable – anything related to nature, astronomy, sports, the tons of niche genres which involve looking at real world things in detail like rail fans, building/architecture fans, bird watchers, etc. is really unpleasant to watch at 480p. That’s the size of an iPad icon!

Stuff like conference talks, of course, really don’t matter but there’s so much material that no generalization won’t be inaccurate for millions of watchers.

I watch a lot of gaming videos or instructional videos that benefit from better resolution when viewing on my iPad. It is beyond aggravating I can't set them to at least 1024 by default.

At least 720p if a screencast is involved (educational videos). 480p screen text often becomes nearly unreadable mush.

imo it's woth it not for the sake of user conversion, but for the sake of minimizing the cost for network load. Technically they'll have the same revenue, but profit will increase due to optimizing the delivery and since most yt users dont have premium I believe this can be a big chunk of money

> This way they'll save money for traffic

If people leave because of this that cuts their costs to zero. What's their incentive not to do this ?

People'll not leave. Yt is pretty only option for this type of content+monetisation

the more people leave the more space there is for a competitor. right now the space outside YT is tiny, and YT should want that to remain the case.