Broadcasters have taken such liberties with High Definition that it is no longer a definition, it’s more of a suggestion.  Cable companies can’t agree on a standard and slap the name HD on feeds that barely improve on SD and Blu-ray struggles as most people have no interest in fixing the video feed so that their TV is actually receiving and showing their movie at proper resolution.  Now we have YouTube doing the same thing, calling a sligthly higher bit rate and widescreen support HD.  While it is nice that our videos of silly human tricks will be higher quality, unless Google is willing to provide actual HD content it seems unlikely that they will be able to start signing up big Hollywood names for distribution via YouTube.  More at The Inqiurer.

“At least, that’s the idea. Youtube has been slowly upgrading the quality of its player. This year it added a high quality player that rendered video at a slightly nicer bitrate. Then last week it moved its player to a widescreen format to accommodate the large amount of content now being shot in 16:9. Now, HD allows an even sharper resolution and higher bitrate.

Of course, to call it HD is a gross misnomer. Yes, it looks sharper and yes, it’s at a higher bitrate. But what Youtube is providing is nowhere near the HD quality being provided by cable TV stations, let alone true HD sources like Blu-ray. It would be more appropriate to call it Higher(er) Definition.”

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