Digital Foundry launch 4K video platform for PS4 Pro content

[Mavrick]

Digital Foundry have launched their dedicated 4K video platform. It's $5 per month for unlimited access to all of their 4K gaming videos.

https://www.digitalfoundry.net

YouTube

What is Digital Foundry?
Digital Foundry was founded in 2004 and began publishing tech analysis on Eurogamer in 2007, with a YouTube channel following the next year. The team specialises in technical analysis of new game releases along with console and PC hardware.

What is the Digital Foundry subscription?
It's really simple. If you like what we do and want to help support us over and above reading our articles and watching our videos, you can pay $5 per month. For that small monthly sum, you get access to high quality versions of every video we produce - including all of our PC and PS4 Pro content produced in 4K. And yes, that includes 4K video at 60fps.

What's wrong with YouTube?
YouTube is a great way to watch all of our video output but it's a streaming platform with limited bandwidth. We produce our videos to the highest standards we can, but YouTube's limited bandwidth often crushes a lot of the quality out of our work. This can be an issue at 1080p, but it's far more of a problem at 4K where most of the quality disappears.

How are your downloads improved?
We use a video encoding technique based on the idea of a constant quality level. Typically, the more complex the image, and the more motion there is, the more bandwidth is used. It ensures a consistent level of image quality throughout and keeps file-size bloat down. We'll be using the h.264 codec with data stored in an MP4 container. As a rough ballpark figure, a 4K 60fps video file tends to be around 500MB per minute of footage. 1080p will be much lower!

How can I play your videos?
Our standard 1080p60 videos should work just fine on any modern computer without too much effort, using the media player of your choice. However, 4K video - especially at 60fps - can require a powerful computer. For 4K TV owners, we recommend copying our videos onto a USB 3.0 flash drive and running them directly on your TV. Our videos are tested on LG, Panasonic and Samsung screens, and the Nvidia Shield Android TV set-top box.

Are the videos protected by DRM?
No.

Are there any adverts in the videos?
No.

Are you planning to keep any content aside for subscribers only?
We may consider providing raw gameplay clips with no voiceover - the raw material we use to create our edits - but right now the plan is simply to provide high quality versions of YouTube content.

What will the subscription money be used for?
Primarily you are paying for the bandwidth used for the video downloads. This is not insignificant. We're offering this option because so much effort goes into producing high quality video and it's a genuine shame that you don't get to see the content as we produced it. The move to 4K makes the need for a quality-driven content delivery platform even more important. Any additional funds will be used to cover the costs of the games and hardware we buy.