HD envy, is just as boring

YouTube’s Chad Hurley: “We Have The Largest Library of HD Video On The Internet.”

It is early days for HD video on the Web, but already we are starting to see jostling for position in this nascent part of the Web video market. Less than two months after YouTube started streaming high-definition videos in a major way, CEO Chad Hurley is now claiming bragging rights as the biggest HD video site on the Web. At a panel today at Davos, he said:

We feel we have the largest library of HD video on the Internet.

If you look at YouTube’s HD category, five pages with about 100 HD videos come up. Hulu’s HD gallery, in contrast, only has six videos. Vimeo’s HD gallery has 178 712 videos. But CBS has at least 1,000 (and it is not clear how many of those are on YouTube in HD quality).

But those are just the featured videos. Search on YouTube for “HD” and then select only results in HD quality, and you get 150,000 results. That doesn’t necessarily mean there are 150,000 different HD videos on YouTube. But search on Hulu for “HD” and you get, once again, six results. CBS and other sites, obviously have more. But it seems likely that YouTube has the most.

I say, whos gives a flying monkey (I would normally use stronger words). Ok its a techcrunch story, so we're unlikely to get anything that interesting but what I don't get is why it matters so much. Anyone can tell you can have HD which looks great and HD which looks bad. Just because its HD doesn't make it instantly better. Also if they think they have a lot of HD videos, they should check out this site everyones using called The Pirate Bay. Yeah I bet they have more HD videos that all of the others put together. I also wanted to add being serious now. i've been uploading HD video to Blip.TV for years now. I must have uploaded at least 100 HD 720p videos just myself, I remember the first time I did Blip.TV didn't even support Widescreen video lets alone HD but they quickly fixed that. This HD envy is penis envy twice over. ohhhh but your HD is only 720p, mine is true HD 1080p. Wow! Who gives a f***! Its all being compressed down to Flash 10 and displayed in a player which supports something like 800px by 450px. Get a grip!

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io