I suspect you're right, and this is a double-whammy when you consider that excluding file sharing, there's no significant driver for internet bandwidth above a

I suspect you're right, and this is a double-whammy when you consider that excluding file sharing, there's no significant driver for internet bandwidth above a small fraction of (even USA) broadband installations. You can stream HD video in 2mbit, and virtually all of the content on YouTube is drastically lower native bitrate than this (and transcoded to 300-384kbps). The elephant in the room is that YouTube should have given Google the "first mover advantage" and control of the legal feature-length TV episode (and perhaps movie) space, giving them the revenue of the popular, high-rate advertising to bear the load of the "uninteresting and unwatchable" (mind you that unwatched media has no bandwidth costs associated with it, reducing it to a storage expense alone). Hulu blindsided Google and now Google's best bet is to pull a Microsoft and iterate and hope for their competitor to slip. This is complicated by the fact that Hulu is backed by the content producers themselves.