What Steve Said: "HD" vs. "High Quality"
At NewTeeVee Live last week, Om and I asked YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen whether or not YouTube had plans to improve its video quality. There's been some confusion and finger-pointing over Chen's reply, so I just want to quickly clear up what happened.
Context & Ripple Effects
YouTube spent early November 2007 building toward a quality upgrade: on November 8 it raised its upload cap from 100 MB to 1 GB and shipped a Windows bulk uploader, then on November 15 CNET reported the company had confirmed high-quality streams were coming. NewTeeVee had even crowdsourced the moment, asking readers for questions for Steve Chen ahead of its NewTeeVee Live conference.
When Chen answered on stage, his reply got garbled in the retelling, and this post is NewTeeVee setting the record straight about what he did and did not say. That a clarification was needed at all says something about how blogs handled quotes in 2007 — the story's one syndicated pickup, HipMojo's 'Sad State of Blogs,' read it exactly that way.
First-order effects
- YouTube faces immediate pressure to pin down its own messaging: with the 1 GB limit live and high-quality streams reportedly confirmed days earlier, an ambiguous answer from Chen leaves the roadmap open to rival interpretations.
- NewTeeVee stakes credibility on being the primary source — correcting the record within days of the conference rather than letting secondhand versions circulate.
Second-order effects
- The 'HD vs. high quality' distinction becomes a marketing battleground: Akamai's October push to demonstrate HD delivery shows vendors and platforms competing on who gets to define the label, so loose language from a platform CTO carries real competitive cost.
- Rivals and CDN partners can read Chen's hedging as a signal that bandwidth economics, not intent, govern YouTube's quality timeline — raising the value of Akamai-style delivery arguments.
Third-order effects
- If quality claims keep getting mangled between stage and blog, video platforms are pushed toward controlled announcements and staged rollouts rather than offhand conference answers as their disclosure mechanism.
- The episode foreshadows quality tiers as a structural feature of online video: once upload caps rise and streams improve, platforms must segment 'standard,' 'high quality,' and 'HD' — and police that vocabulary carefully.
The trend: Online video is moving from bandwidth-constrained uniformity to tiered quality, with terminology ('HD' vs. 'high quality') becoming a competitive asset that platforms must manage as deliberately as their encoders.