• by Wayne Friedman , December 11, 2008

NBC may be concerned about network prime-time viewers, but not its broadband video audience. The network has doubled its digital audience in just one month.

Days after mixed reviews concerning Jay Leno's prime-time move on NBC to a five-day-a-week 10 p.m. time slot, Hulu.com--NBC Universal-News Corp's joint Web venture--and its partner sites doubled their unique U.S. viewers to 24 million in October from its previous month.

According to comScore, the Internet research company, Hulu.com served up 235 million video views in October--the sixth-largest online video destination. The Hulu site launched this past March. Hulu-partner sites account for three-quarters of its total video business, while Hulu.com's business alone amounted to 5.3 million unique visitors in October.

Much of Hulu's gains were from those special Tiny Fey "Saturday Night Live" sketches, her impersonations of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The No. 1 video Web destination is still Google. Its video sites pulled in 5.4 billion videos and 100 million unique viewers, with virtually all coming from Google's YouTube.com. Fox Interactive Media, where the majority of its business comes from MySpace, was second with 519.9 million videos. Third place belonged to Yahoo sites with 363.4 million, followed by Viacom with 305.3 million and Microsoft with 286.5 million.

Overall, there were more than 147 million unique U.S. video users in October--viewing 13.5 billion videos in October, according to comScore. That number is up 45% from a year ago.