NEW YORK CITY—Google rolled out a Video Quality Report for YouTube in Canada a few months ago to help Internet service providers and users analyze streaming performance in each city and region. ISPs receive detailed reports, and consumers can check the website to see typical performance where they live.

This can partly be seen as an effort to shame ISPs that offer poor video quality, much as Netflix has done with its monthly speed rankings . Today, a Google executive said the company is also helping ISPs “upsell” consumers to pricier Internet services by advertising high-definition YouTube quality.

“It has effectively drawn attention to ISPs that are able to, at least on one of their products, offer an HD experience,” Keith McCallion, technical program manager of peering and content delivery for Google, said in a presentation at the Content Delivery Summit in New York. “What we’re able to do here is work with those ISPs to differentiate between their fiber product and their legacy ADSL product. The idea is this will upsell users to packages where they can actually sustain HD rates of video.”

While Netflix simply shows an average of all streams across an ISP’s network, Google is aiming to be more specific. The Google data shows the throughput that at least 90 percent of users receive based upon a month’s worth of data and billions of measurements per day. The data is shown by region, city, and even in different parts of cities for the bigger markets.

“If you’re able to sustain bit rates that are compatible with HD, we’ll call you HD verified,” McCallion said. “This way people know they should expect an HD experience when they’re using this ISP, and it’s something for ISPs to work toward.”

In some countries where Internet access isn’t as good, just sustaining a consistent streaming connection is an achievement, even if it’s only in standard definition.

“We do still have some markets where [standard definition] is the relevant metric,” he said.

Google uses the same type of data to make decisions about upgrading its own capacity.

While Canada was first to get YouTube quality reports, “it goes without saying that we will launch it in other markets relatively soon,” McCallion said.

McCallion also described how the Google Global Cache peering and content delivery network has been used to improve YouTube quality over the past few years. Google deploys video caches throughout the world—and peers with ISPs in more than 70 locations in more than 30 countries—making Google one of the most heavily peered networks in the world, he said.