My problem is I get high resolution (1080p) even if I want 240p!

I might be traveling and be on very expensive 3g data, and want to listen to a video and not care about the display but low quality setting means little when you are a premium user.

You have to explicitly change video resolution every time the next video starts playing.

You cannot choose explicit resolution preferences like you used to.

And I get no difference in what happens to resolutions chosen for me between these two quality settings. Seems random/non-deterministic.

Hmm, I don’t have this use-case so maybe it really doesn’t work, but are you sure you went to Settings > Video quality preferences and set it correctly there?

If that doesn’t work – reach out to YouTube support – as a Premium subscriber, you get to speak with a human.