HD share

~ the obit ~

In July 2008 I had a TTNet line and a YouTube habit, and no reason whatsoever to care which site a video physically sat on. That indifference is roughly the thing HD share was built against, from Martigny in the Swiss canton of Valais, by three people whose ages added up to sixty three.

The Swiss daily 20 minutes ran them on 16 July 2008 under a headline about inventing high definition video sharing on the web. Kalle Sintonen was seventeen. Christophe Fellay and Samuel Dorsaz were both twenty three. The article opens on the Hancock trailer playing at a quality its writer had not seen in a browser before, and quotes Sintonen saying that YouTube had never aimed at high definition, and that ninety percent of internet users could play what HD share served.

The company behind it was registered in Finland. The site's own footer names Novelion Media Oy Ltd of Laserkatu 6 in Lappeenranta, with a Finnish business identity number against it. English Wikipedia calls HD share American, which the footer settles.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eight times ~

What the founders told 20 minutes was that their picture quality ran eight times higher than the ordinary sharing sites, and in 2008 that was not an outrageous claim to make. The revenue idea was the more interesting half: paid private sharing rather than advertising, the worked example being a football agent sending a player's clip to a coach. For anyone without the upstream bandwidth to send a large file, they offered to take a DVD in the post and put it online for twenty or fifty Swiss francs. Forty thousand visits a month was the traffic that July.

~ the notice ~

On 10 June 2009 a notice replaced the front page, printed in English above French. "Due to the increasing illegal content posted to HD share we need to announce the interruption for an indefinite period of service." It says they are looking at every solution that would let them restart quickly, and that tightening the check on each video before it goes live will unfortunately slow the upload process down. It ends with an address for suggestions, at novelion.net.

A site built on the proposition that anyone could upload something enormous had found out what anyone uploads. The archive holds nothing at all between that notice and July 2011.

~ the beta that followed ~

It did come back. By the late summer of 2011 hdshare.tv was running on ClipBucket, an off-the-shelf video sharing package, behind a banner reading "! Warning ! HD share is open in a public beta" with a note about limited capacity underneath. The footer read HD share 2011 and pointed at something called USN Video solutions. The top users listed on the front page had between ninety and a couple of hundred videos each.

A working site is still there on 23 December 2011. Eleven days later, on 3 January 2012, the address returns a 404. By the end of that April the domain served a meta refresh into a Flippa listing describing it as a premium name for an HD sharing website, and a month after that it was a parked page selling cash advances.

English Wikipedia has it closing in 2010, which the captures contradict in both directions at once: the first stop came in June 2009, and the site was running again across the back half of 2011. hdshare.tv today is an Indonesian video-downloader operation, unrelated in every respect. The original site lasted eleven months and the relaunch lasted five, with a two-year silence in between. The second time, nobody posted anything at all.

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