Returning to this post as the decided subject matter on the topic ;3
Mostly reiterating what i’ve said before, this isn’t tower “banning” a video as I’ve heard some mention or anything like that, it’s a codec issue due to whatever player Tower uses not supporting the AV1av1c* codec.
Just to clarify, there’s nothing youtube will change on this that will make this better, they’d already moved away from anything but their own formats (vp9 and av1), and are now slowly deprecating vp9 encoding as its a much more expensive encode vs av1 which is the successor, which is cheaper to encode and gives smaller sizes.
I’d assume they’ll likely eventually make all videos av1 encoded, at current though its taken some years for webm/vp9 support to get as broad as it has, notably apple didn’t support it for many many years, and as a fun “easter egg”, you can actually find a spike in reports online of ios users unable to play youtube videos through safari once youtube stopped serving anything but vp9 and removed the additional formats they used to serve, right around when this issue cropped up on tower!
Not taking any sides here, just stating the facts, and ultimately its a client thing, youtube/google have no motivation to continue using older formats that take more size (or in the case of h264, costs them money) if they can avoid it, they keep vp9 around on popular videos (and for some reason newly uploaded 4k vids, not sure what the logic behind it is, but i believe this trick still works) so those are accessible to as many clients as possible (gotta make sure little timmy can watch mr. beast), but are slowly converting the rest to av1 only.
TL;DR Tower would need to fix this, as its highly unlikely google will back out of the change, and the problem will probably only grow as time goes on. In the meantime, if you want to fix any videos you own, you need to upload them in 4k resolution, any others you’d have to download, upscale, and reupload.