Not to beat the point to death, but online video clearly has become a habit among users. In its first report on video since the middle of last year, Nielsen finds that video consumption (time spent) is up 45% in January 2011 over the same period last year. The number of streams increased 31.5% and the number of streams accessed per user for the month was up 27.5%. Even on a month-to-month basis, there remains good momentum, with overall time spent up 8.4% for January over December. Increased video consumption is becoming a more important growth driver as we approach …

Super Bowl advertising is the gift that keeps on giving to online news. Polls and debates over the spots lingered for days. Groupon gave us a special bonus this year with its staggering misfire of send-ups of charity ads. Now it is time for the after-after party, reflections on the deeper effects of that advertising film festival.

Because the PR war between Apple and Adobe over the Flash video player just wasn't strange enough, Adobe resurrected ghosts of video history when releasing its latest player version yesterday. "Here is San Francisco, we've had a bit of tradition around changing how folks see the world with images," the company said in its rollout. Early film pioneer Edward Muybridge and TV inventor Philo Farnsworth were invoked and compared to the 2002 introduction of the Flash Player.

The trajectory of online video use has been on a hockey stick path for years, but the latest year-end review of 2010 from comScore duly underscores just how firmly the medium has taken hold as a digital mainstay. The comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in review finds that the average number of people in our market who watched video online each day skyrocketed 32% to 88.6 million between December 2009 and December 2010. All other key metrics grew as well: number of viewing sessions per person (+13%), hours spent (+12% or 14 hours in December 2010), and number of streams …

It is hard to believe that only a few short years ago the digital media gasped in awestruck amazement at Steve Job's ability to get even a handful of major studios to agree to selling downloadable feature films. But now, digital movie sales and rentals are commonplace and the next issue concerns who wins the race? According to IHS Screen Digest's latest report, The Apple iTunes store continues to dominate the field with 64.5% of market share in the sales and video on demand market for 2010, down from a 74.4% market share in 2009.

There are more than enough opinions flying about this morning about who "won" the Super Ad Bowl that now runs parallel to the big game. Hulu's voting audience has declared "The Force," a VW ad featuring a kid Darth Vader 'magically' starting a car to be the most popular, followed by the Bridgestone "Carma" spot (beaver saves driver from rushing torrent) and VW's "Black Beetle." The Dorito's House Sitting ad (grandpa resurrected) and the NFL ad reprising great TV moments round out the top faves. Interestingly, Hulu's visitors rewarded concept over celebrity. We don't see stars (aside from the NFL …

Fans of Web stunts may recall the "Life in a Day" project that ran last year from YouTube. Mimicking somewhat similar photographic essays from magazine media, this project invited users to upload video pieces of their lives. It was up to them how they expected to chronicle evidence of their existence on planet Earth. But all of the clips were to be taken on July 24, 2010 so that these clips could be edited and melded into a final product. Call it a mashup on a global scale.

Here is a Web flashback for everyone -- "Happy Puppy." For longtime gamers, the name will be recognizable as the site to be on in the mid to late 1990s. When I was writing for the company, we explored a number of different editorial approaches to gaming, including long features on the arts of storytelling and a series I initiated on whether gaming was art. That issue came to the foreground last year again when film critic Roger Ebert issued his controversial edict that gaming was not "art." When I engaged the topic nearly fifteen years ago, however, video gaming …

If there were any doubt that the mobile moment has arrived and that video will be a key part of it, then Cisco will help lay it to rest this week. The network hardware behemoth predicts that worldwide mobile data traffic will have increased 26-fold between 2010 and 2015 for a compound annual growth rate of 92% for the five-year period. The proliferation of connected devices and the insatiable appetite for streaming video across those devices will be the key drivers of this massive surge in mobile traffic, Cisco says.

We speculate a lot about how many people out there in America really are cutting the cord from their TV service and relying on Internet or connected TV experiences to satisfy that big screen hunger. But what would happen if someone took your TV service provider away for a week and left behind one of the trendy Over The Top (OTT) boxes in its place? That is what Hill Holliday did recently with five Boston-area families. The company removed their standard cable boxes and gave them an Apple TV, a Roku, Boxee Box, Xbox 360 or Google TV.