Movie and streaming trailers have a problem – and I'm getting tired of it

I write about streaming a whole heap – many pieces a week, dedicated to newly-released trailers, news and teasers, and that exposes me to a lot of trailers. It's a responsibility that generally means I'm well on top of what's coming down the pipeline, not just for the best streaming services out there but also to cinemas.

That's a big upside, and it's always nice to check at 2PM here in the UK to see if any of the big studios or streamers have uploaded anything I should be paying attention to. That's generally when those big uploads happen, making it a fun part of the day – but also one that almost always involves a minor annoyance.

I've already written a few pieces this year about how I've been making the predictable journey into becoming an enthusiast for physical media, and that's meant I'm more aware than ever of video bitrates, codecs and the threat of visual artefacts and glitches.

That makes it extremely frustrating when I see big studios upload massively anticipated trailers, only to click into them and find they're topping out at a suspiciously unimpressive-looking 1080p. In some cases, like the Dune: Part Three trailer I've embedded below, this does eventually turn into a 4K version once YouTube has processed things properly, but you can't rely on that.

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Plenty of massive trailers in recent weeks are languishing in 1080p because that's all their creators have bothered to make, despite the fact that they're almost guaranteed to be sitting on 4K files or better. Even the new trailer for the Harry Potter series on HBO, which will surely be the biggest TV show of the year when it comes out in late 2026, is stuck on 1080p.

I have YouTube Premium, and now basically can't live without it, and that sometimes means that I get access to an "enhanced bitrate" version of these streams, and I can just about tell the difference when that's active, but the fact that such a boost is locked behind a paywall frankly sucks.

Even when the trailers are 4K, you can still often get pronounced colour banding and artifacting, although capturing this and demonstrating it through web-compressed images is tough – the below sunset from that Dune trailer shows it if you can squint, though.

Look, I know there are practical realities at play here – and way more layers of admin and secrecy than I can probably imagine when a big trailer is being readied for upload. Still, I've seen other massive creative studios (like Rockstar for its GTA 6 trailers) manage to have a 4K version live and waiting for an embargo.

Why can't movie studios and streamers catch up with that? If it's a simple matter of someone high-up getting extremely familiar with how YouTube's upload tools actually work, then I'm begging those people to do so.

To plenty of people it might not matter much, but when you're among the first to watch a huge trailer, it sucks that you're likely to be watching it in the worst quality in which it'll ever be available. Sort it out, I beg!