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."

Demand will be met

[mcrbids]

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?

Broadband

[Mike610544]

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.

Greatest fun is ahead of us

[suv4x4]

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.

Re:Demand will be met

[KGIII]

Hey! I still have some of my VHS tapes! But on a serious note, I don't think we'll even begin to see television or even typical print media types "die" for a great long time because there are still too many places (in my country at least) where broadband rollouts have stimied the bean counters. Oddly that country is America but that's a story for another day.