To Neal Mohan (CEO of YouTube) and the YouTube Engineering Team,

If you have recently watched a movie clip, music video, or short film on YouTube and thought it looked strangely like a cheap video game or daytime television broadcast, you are experiencing the "Soap Opera Effect."

A growing trend of uploading AI-interpolated, 60 frames-per-second (60p) videos is actively destroying the artistic intent behind cinematic storytelling. What is even more frustrating is that YouTube currently forces viewers to watch this content in 60p if they want to enjoy it in High Definition (HD) or 4K.

We are calling on YouTube to implement a simple "Playback Rate" toggle in the video player settings, allowing viewers to disable the 60fps stream and watch videos in a standard 24fps or 30fps format without sacrificing image resolution.

As a working photographer and cinematographer, I understand the meticulous planning that goes into crafting a visual narrative for high-end projects. We intentionally shoot at 24 frames per second to capture a specific, natural motion blur. This cadence gives weight to movement, grounds the scene in reality, and creates the "cinematic look" that audiences have subconsciously connected with storytelling for over a century.

When a 24p film is artificially upscaled to 60p using frame generation, it completely strips away this carefully crafted texture. The motion becomes hyper-smooth and unnatural. Multi-million dollar productions suddenly look like amateur home videos.

Currently, YouTube's platform architecture penalizes the viewer. If a creator or fan channel uploads a video with a 60fps flag, YouTube locks the 720p, 1080p, and 4K playback options to that 60fps rate. To bypass the unnervingly smooth motion, users are forced to manually downgrade their viewing quality to 480p or lower. In an era of high-resolution displays, forcing viewers to choose between intolerable motion-smoothing or pixelated image quality is unacceptable.

The Solution is Simple and Already Possible: We are not asking YouTube to ban 60fps content. We are simply asking for viewer agency.

YouTube’s backend already encodes multiple versions of every video uploaded to its servers. Third-party browser extensions have proven that the standard 30fps/24fps streams still exist at 1080p and 4K resolutions on YouTube's backend.

We request that YouTube exposes this existing functionality natively. By adding a "Playback Rate" or "Disable High Frame Rate" toggle next to the Resolution settings in the gear icon, YouTube can instantly solve this problem.

Artistic intent matters. Viewers deserve the right to watch films, music videos, and visual art the way the directors and cinematographers intended them to be seen.

Sign this petition to tell YouTube: Give us a Normal Mode.
Let us turn off 60fps without ruining our video quality.
Let’s protect cinematic motion.