• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, February 6, 2013

You want to know how much the online video market is changing the way we get information?

Consider this eye-opener from the Guardian, the fun/serious/bold British newspaper whose guardian.co.uk has a huge worldwide readership—over 3.6 million unique visitors a day .

The Website's Ozoda Muminova reports that that according to comScore’s VideoMetrix Report, broadcasters accounted for only 4.4% of the 10.6 billion online videos viewed in the United Kingdom in December.

That’s not totally surprising, of course, because nearly 40% of the videos viewed were on YouTube. So, as in this country, to some degree everybody was fighting over crumbs YouTube leaves, but it does point to what would seem to be an absurd situation.

Broadcasters, with the huge ability to collect and distribute video, would seem to be likely candidates to lead the online video pack. But the Internet (and again, YouTube specifically) have spread out the field to point that makes some natural video providers seem almost invisible. Americans go to CNN, Fox and MSNBC and sites operated by the broadcast networks, but local TV Websites, not in every case but in many cases, are not go-to places for videos. ABC thrived once by being the inventor of something called “Eyewitness News” in big cities where it owns stations. There’s no TV-inspired equivalent to that on the Internet, though what a place to tote eye-witnessing.    

The Guardian also reported that 45% of its global views are now being delivered mobile phones and tablets, a stunning signal of how habits can change by convenient media. Looked at it another way, the Guardian’s natural environment has gone from a big broadsheet to a computer screen and then to a smaller and not so-small screen, and the latter two developments happened rapidly.

According to research from SecondSync, UK’s Twitter users—and there are 11.5 million of them—are attached at the hip to their phones. A full 80% of them access Twitter through a mobile device and  60% tweet while watching TV. Is this next stat good or bad for TV: In the UK, 40% of all Twitter traffic happens during their prime time equivalent. That represents an opportunity for competing media (as some advertisers realized during the Super Bowl). Or it creates the fatal final diversion.

That cross-wiring what’s impossibly frustrating and fascinating for what once was mainstream media. The newspaper and TV network now is the overwhelmingly large background that increasingly few pay attention to. Rhat is creating a wide open landscape that is changing so much, so radically, and so permanently.