Video Streams Enjoy Impressive Growth

Although traditional TV analysts claim that online video is still a sliver of overall video watching, video streaming on the Internet continues to move forward this summer.

Nielsen Co.'s July 2009 VideoCensus says total video streams climbed 31.4% to 11.2 billion, with a 14.2% increase in unique viewers to 136 million -- per eMarketer.com.

Viewers' average usage rose 42.2% to about three-and-a-half hours a month in July. Also, the average number of streams per viewer witnessed a 15.1% gain, to 82.4 streams per month.

Not surprisingly, YouTube continues to be a dominant force with video streams, now at more than 7 billion streams and 104 million unique users a month. Hulu is a distant second, with 383 million streams and 10.3 million unique viewers a month. Yahoo follows at 265.5 million streams.

Although Hulu has seen major growth in video streams, it still trails other top 10 video sites when it comes to unique visitors -- Yahoo (29.9 million), MSN/Bing (18.0 million), Fox (14.7 million), and CNN (11.7 million).

advertisement

advertisement

Record viewership numbers were also hit in June in total Internet viewing, according to comScore. Unique viewership was at 157.1 million for online video destinations, with the average videos per viewer at 124.1 in the period.

Looking at Internet groups for June, comScore says Google led the way -- largely thanks to YouTube, with an average 112.6 million unique viewers and 67.8 videos per viewer.

Microsoft Web sites were next at 72.9 million average unique viewers and 9.5 videos per user. Fox was in third place at 59.5 million uniques and 10.1 videos per viewer.

Recent video estimates say online video is still just 1% to 3% of the overall video viewing, with traditional TV viewing the dominant player.

US Online Video Viewer Metrics, July 2009 chart

Next story loading loading..