This may seem unrelated, but I don't think it is: I'm a programmer by profession and hobby, but woodworking is my other hobby and I belong to a club which has demonstrations at its meetings. They've got flat panel TVs mounted from the ceiling so those in the cheaper seats can see the demo and a few cameras mounted on the lathe at different angles. There is a switch box so an operator can easily switch which camera is shown on the TVs in real time and an output to record all of this. Now the issue: all the cameras, switch, and output are all standard def despite the TVs being HD. While such a setup is pretty cheap in SD, it's NOT EVEN AVAILABLE except in pro level equipment. HD cameras which save to a built in SD card are cheap, but can you even find a recorder capable of taking in unencrypted HDMI and recording it?
There are lots of woodworkers who make demonstration videos and put them on YouTube, but they're all either single camera or SD because multi-camera HD just isn't available to non-professionals.
I think over the past decade the creation of high quality content has really opened up to everyone, but then copyright issues came up because those same tools could be used to copy things. Now it feels to me like we're not supposed to notice that we're not being given access to those tools anymore. Tablets are great, I've got one, but they're more focused on consumption than creation. Sure you can get a cheap HD camera which will let you shoot your cat doing something cute and post it to YouTube, but you can't get what you'd need to make something a little more watchable.
I'm not trying to make claims of a big conspiracy, but it's hard to imagine that some of the big picture types at various corporations aren't noticing this trend and liking it.