Online Video Popularity Still Climbing

Ant writes "Macworld reports that people in the U.S. have steadily increased the amount of time they spend watching videos online, as Google's YouTube remains by far their preferred video site, according to a study. In July, almost 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched videos online, up from 71.4 percent in March, according to comScore Networks. The monthly time spent watching videos went up to an average of 181 minutes per viewer in July from 145 minutes per viewer in March, according to comScore. In July, the average user watched 68 clips, up from 55 clips in March. Overall, almost 134 million U.S. Internet users watched a little over 9 billion video clips in July, up from 126.6 million people and a little over 7 billion clips in March."

Who doesn't

We are all well past the "Internet Age" hype. Video killed the radio star? How about Internet killed the TV/Movie star.

Re:Who doesn't

Actually it's Internet Killed the video star http://www.poptix.net/funny/videostar.swf [poptix.net] ;-)

Re:Who doesn't

Actually it's Internet Killed the video star http://www.poptix.net/funny/videostar.swf [poptix.net] ;-)

Not really true. MTV killed videos itself about 10 years ago when it decided to stop airing them,... replacing real music content with Beavis and Butt-Head, and crap pop culture reality shows,... The good news is, at least YouTube seems to have somewhat resurrected music videos! ;-)

Re:Who doesn't

And apparently brought back the radio star. almost 2,000,000 new Rick Astley fans and counting.

Demand will be met

When customers don't get what they want, they'll look for a way to get it. And when somebody provides what the customers want, they'll buy it.

How much simpler could it be?

I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, and I'll pay up to a couple bucks a day to get it. I don't want to wait, and I don't want alot of hassle. What we're seeing is the end of an era - the era of broadcast television. Broadcast television will wane, and the quality of online video developed under alternative business models will improve. (We hope - most of the YouTube content is either pirate or just awful to watch)

But the ability is there, and the public networks aren't (so far) willing to adapt. So they'll die.

How much simpler could it be?

Re:Demand will be met

What we're seeing is the end of an era - the era of broadcast television.

Now, now. Don't be so quick. I agree we're in the early stages of transition, and in the next years we'll see lots of channels broadcast on the internet, but don't kill classic TV just yet.

You know they killed radio and cinema when TV was introduced, and killed cinema yet again with VHS. Then with DVD again (but ok.. VHS died :) ).

There are currently a billion or more folks world wide at 30+ who prefer the passive experience of cable/air TV (I'm not saying it's a bad thing either), and the market will continue to deliver to this market, if even for the sheer amount of investment in broadcast equipment they already have.

For the longest time I see content being broadcast on both classical TV and on demand. While in the next 5 years I expect the Internet on-demand/live streaming business will boom, I expect it won't be before 20-30 years that we see classic broadcast TV become a niche and disappear, if ever.

Online video site business model.

1. Get lots of venture capital, somehow.

2. Declare the site beta.

3. Allow people to upload videos as high as 18 megabits per second. [divx.com]

4. Wonder where all the venture capital went.

You gotta see Tourette's Guy!

OMG.. someone please post the Tourette's Guy videos!

"I hope this is the Puff Daddy version and not that Sting piece of SHIT!!!..." pause.. "AWWW FUCK!!!"

Broadband

It would be interesting to see how much of this is due to the (partial?) death of dial-up internet access. Is the rate of increase consistent with dialup->DSL/cable conversions? Even within the "broadband" realm, I'm much more likely to click a video link now that my DSL is 3 Mb compared to when it was 760Kb.

Upload vs. Download stats

While Comcast's recent actions [slashdot.org] threaten to stifle innovation [techdirt.com] in this space, Netflix and Amazon Unbox will eventually win. Not to mention YouTube. What is interesting is that related industries such as video search engines [blinkx.com] and content producers like this [nytimes.com] will flourish.

I'd like to see some statistics on how many people upload videos vs. how many download/watch them.

Like the study that showed men like hot women...

In other equally shocking news... The majority of online videos are pornography, fake web cam advertisements for pornography, and videos of people getting hit in the balls. The sky is still blue, and so are my balls.

This was news, several years ago...

At what point will people stop reporting that "more people are doing X and Y on the internet"? Yes, lots of people do things on the internet. It will grow as more people get online and connections get faster. It isn't really very interesting.

Looking at websites? Check.
Downloading music? Check.
Social networks online? Check.
Watching videos? Check.

Can we just presume that more people are doing whatever next comes along, and not keep reporting on it?

Greatest fun is ahead of us

Only recently have content-producing companies, and TV channels started to offer their video content on-line (sometimes for free).

Only weeks ago was Flash with MPEG4+AAC beta announced. And only days ago was Silverlight 1.0 with WMV support announced.

I expect in the next 5 years we'll see a huge surge in online video as video content producers scramble to take a foot in this brand new market.

And I actually expect online video will outdo bittorrent traffic, since a large part of bittorent traffic now is actually various TV series and movies, things that will be legally available for streaming in the near future.

The big question mark is: what do ISP-s do about it. They can filter and slow down bittorrent traffic since the popular opinion is it consists mostly of illegal content (and it's mostly, though not entirely correct). They'll have a quite unique problem doing so with streaming media (and you can wrap streaming in HTTP traffic on port 80 too) when official distributors start streaming DVD or HD quality content as the rule, rather than the exception.

Yes, but....

...these videos probably amount for 90% of that time:

http://www.clutterme.com/internetpeople [clutterme.com]

(not really a shameless plug since that page has nothing to do with my site)

75

almost 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched videos online, up from 71.4 percent in March

71.4% is almost 75% this article shows very little change

Re:What the...

It's /. Just say something about soviet russia. It all falls into place after that....