[gravypod]

Yea I understand that. My comment is more about how it's possible that HD streaming would cost that much more.

I've been able to do it at a bitrate that is acceptable over a crappy network. I'd say that I'm not very smart and that a group of well-paid engineers should be able to do better than that.

If the cost is just "because people will pay that much more for it" then that is fine but as it rests right now it is because "the bandwidth would cost that much more"

[MPetitt]

A lot of the problem comes with A: High Quality B: High Scale C: Consistent quality internationally

Properly encoded HD video is still easily 4 times larger than the SD equivalent, so that leads to 4 times the bandwidth costs.