News is the most popular genre of online video with every age group except for those ages 18-29, for whom comedy is watched more. YouTube is the most popular destination, with 27% of online video consumers saying they watch or download video from YouTube.

It's on that latter point that this week's poll will revolve. Read/WriteWeb readers are likely to use a larger variety of online video sites than the Pew audience, so we're curious what the results of this poll will be. Note that there are literally hundreds of video sharing sites on the Web - we listed a lot of them in our February Online Video Index. So we can't hope to include them all. But shout out in the comments if your favorite online video site isn't in the list.

So, it's now August 2007 - has online video been the biggest trend in 2007? You could argue that Facebook and iPhone have been bigger events in 2007, but online video is still right up there.

To find out exactly how big an impact online video has had in 2007 so far, we're doing a special series this week. We'll look back on R/WW articles about online video, as well as those from our niche blog devoted to online video and other aspects of the digital lifestyle - last100. We'll also pick out the best of online video and predict what's to come.

The highlights? YouTube viewership grew 9% according to Nielsen, Metacafe grew 27% and Yahoo! Video viewership fell by an amazing 60%.

My takeaways from these numbers? There's plenty of room for change in this market, as expected the TV writers' strike may be increasing online numbers, look out for Metacafe and don't assume that YouTube's growth will slow.

If you're interested in the online video market, you should make sure you're subscribed to the feed for NewTeeVee, the GigaOm network's video news blog.

You can watch videos right on the site in their own custom interface which is consistent no matter which site's video you are viewing. You can also click through to visit the original web site, if desired. When you're finished viewing, you can share videos with friends and leave comments and recommendations - an experience common to most internet video sharing sites. As you're watching a video, you can continue browsing for more videos while keeing the current video playing in the right sidebar.

You can also customize Invision.tv so it matches your interests. Like YouTube, you can subscribe to channels and create playlists, but Invision.tv lets you embed those playlists on your own web site or blog. However, what's different about this site compared to many other video portals is that, behind-the-scenes, their recommendation engine is scouring the site to find new video choices to present to you which match up with the type of content you find interesting. Here at RWW, we like recommendation engines so we're looking forward to giving this one a test drive.

In a recent blog post, the Mefeedia team noted that YouTube (and Flash Video generally) has revolutionized online video, "making it easy to browse and view what you are looking for". The problem, says Mefeedia, is that quality suffers on 1st generation video sites such as YouTube. Mefeedia thinks it's time for the next generation of online video, which the company says will have the following attributes:

Mefeedia says it is an example of 2nd generation online video. Browsing through the site, I found it does have a lot of recommendations (by other users), there are lots of tags to choose from, over 200 guides, and you can create personalized channels and playlists. You can also watch videos in a variety of different ways - feed readers, media players, mobile devices, etc. By default, it uses Quicktime (not Flash) to stream videos - but you can also choose to download them.

Note: I wonder what Mefeedia thinks of Flash video now that Adobe Player 9 has been upgraded to HD TV quality? That may negate their second point above.

The sign-up is quick and easy and there is no shortage of content. Is this the 2nd generation of online video? It certainly has many excellent personalization and recommendation features. All in all, well worth checking out if you're after new online video experiences.

In May 2007, Google sites (primarily YouTube) streamed nearly 1.8 billion videos, good for 21.5% of the US market. Their next closes competitor, Fox Interactive (primarily MySpace Video) streamed just 680 million -- or 8.1% of the US market.

Some other eye popping figures: 75% of Americans watched video online in the past month, and 1 in 3 did so on YouTube. The average video streamer consumed well over 2.5 hours of online video (I confess that I've watched probably more than that in the past month, thanks in part to an always enlightening and entertaining Guy Kawasaki-hosted roundtable discussion). The average video consumer watched more than 2 videos per day, which unless my math is totally batty means that most people are using more than one site (and probably more than two) to get their online video fix.

As we reported last week, Hollywood is taking online video more seriously, and according to ABI Research, there will be nearly 1 billion online video consumers by 2012. As the audience for Internet video and user generated content grows, Google's mega acquisition of market-dominating YouTube, which accounts for about 95% of the company's video streams, last fall looks more and more wise.

This study, which was sponsored by media research firm Nielsen, however, concludes that the average adult in the U.S. still watches an almost unbelievable 5 1/2 hours of live TV every day. 94% of adults watch TV on any given day, while most people only watch online videos for a few minutes a day.

TV (including DVR playback) represents 99% of all the video watched by U.S. adults, and even for the youngest group in the sample, those 18-24, online video only represented 2% of all screen time.

The Bad News for TV

In terms of general use, however, computers and mobile screens have clearly taken time away from TV, even if online video still has a lot of room to grow. Users 18-24 spend more time in front of their computer screens than any other group (143 min a day on average), but still watch 210 min of TV every day.

The older a person, the more time they are likely to spend in front of their TV (421 min for those 65 and older). For TV executives, however, this means that the next generation of viewers will most likely spend even less time in front of their TVs.

With YouTube XL, Boxee, and the new Hulu Desktop, a growing number of players are also now pushing online video onto the TV screens of mainstream users, and chances are that within a few years, online video and traditional TV will simply start to converge. While we will probably still be watching the majority of video on TV sets, users will care less and less whether it is coming from their cable company or ISP.

Note: we reported some data from a preliminary version of this report in March.

"Each portable media device, like an iPod or PSP, accepts a very limited number of file extensions, if even more than just one [...] What our company does is provide the means for a video in an incompatible format to be available for whatever media device the user wants to transfer it to."

The devices supported currently include video iPod, Sony Playstation Portable, Creative Zen, Zune, Video Cell Phone and a basic Windows/Mac/Linux compatible file format. A few of those use MPEG-4, so mobile devices are not quite as incompatible as it first appears.

Note that there are plenty of file conversion services around, but not many are part of an online video service. If you know of other sites that already offer a file conversion feature, tell us in the comments.

Comscore issued their report for July website traffic in the online video sector today and two numbers really stand out. The company estimates that US web users viewed more than 5 billion videos that month and says that 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in July. Those are some pretty high numbers, but 3rd party traffic stats always have to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Do you believe that online video is this universal yet?

• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.


• 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).


• 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).


• The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

How good are these numbers from Comscore? It's hard to know. The company is widely respected, but so is Hitwise, another traffic analyst firm that comes up with very different numbers. See our write up in June of a Hitwise report that argued that the video market in general was declining but that YouTube had a 75% marketshare in May. Comscore reports that YouTube has a 44% marketshare. Both companies agree on who the leaders are, perhaps Comscore is just looking further out the long tail in who it includes in the category.

All of these numbers are subject to interpretation and no one's data collection method is anywhere near perfect. Do you believe the assertion that 75% of the US market online watched online video in July? We regularly talk to people who don't know the first thing about anything regarding the internet, but perhaps even they spend time on YouTube or use Windows Media Player to watch news video on the big news portals.

Let us know your take on the believability of these numbers in the poll above. For more details, see Comscore's full report.

One of the requirements for any video added to the site is that it be based on open-source formats. With the heavy exposure that the Wikipedia web site receives - often the number one search ranking for any subject and the seventh most popular web site in the world - the organization hopes to put pressure on other content holders to release more of their videos into the public domain.

Neither adding a video to the site nor clipping a section of video will require users to have any sort of video-editing software on their computer - all the tools will be provided online. In the future, Wikipedia plans to add more features to the system so as to allow users to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips embedded in the articles, just as users are able to edit text on the site today.

To help with the video effort, Wikipedia has partnered with Kaltura, an open source video solution provider, who is helping to develop the necessary tools for importing the video content. The partnership was originally announced back in January of 2008.

In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

Hitwise reports that overall video viewership in May of this year fell 9% compared to May of last year, but times on site grew 6%. That's strange. We've asked whether the rapidly growing Hulu is included in this batch of numbers and will update this post when we get a reply. (Update: Hitwise says that Hulu is now the 13th most watched video site and is seeing consistent growth each month.) Could it be that last year saw a large number of people checking out online video for the first time, only a certain percentage of them found that they liked it but those people are now watching more than before? If readers have any theories why the video market is declining in absolute number of viewers, we'd love to hear them.

YouTube's huge dominance over a market that includes a wide variety of different video sites, each with different communities and feature sets, probably does not bode very well for innovation in the sector. We'd love to see more people checking out innovative services like Metacafe, Blip.tv and others. We wrote about the top video content producers in the world yesterday, many of which are bigger in places other than YouTube. Smaller up and comers outside of YouTube deserve some attention, too.

Out of all the reports, the thing that most strikes me is how much Google believes video is the future of the Internet. As Paul Kedrosky put it in his excellent wrapup of the news:

"Google is very, very bullish about online video. It was more than spin, with the conviction coming through loud and clear."

PaidContent.org also quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “This is the next step in the evolution of the internet. It (video’s) a natural next step.”

The YouTube brand will continue, probably with the addition of Google Adsense at some point.

There is a LOT of talk about the deal, but for me it's significant as a watershed moment for the Web and online video. If Google is willing to spend $1.65B on the leading online video company, then they must believe that for both YouTube and the online video industry as a whole - there is a lot more growth to come.

YouTube is in many ways the MTV of the current generation. What's more, it has a user experience better than any other online video site OR tv channel. Check out Compete's recent analysis of YouTube compared to Google's own video site for some clear reasons why:

"More people visit YouTube, they come back to the site more often, and spend more time on the site each time they visit. That is a certifiable triple whammy and a knockout punch rolled into one."

Enough talk, it'll be interesting to watch what Google does with YouTube now - beyond putting its ads on it.

Video is huge, I think it's established that it's not a fad. Comscore reported this month that US consumers are watching an average of 3 hours of video online in the month of July, more on Google sites than anywhere else. It's a lot higher than that in my house (though we watch StumbleUpon Video). I'd be very interested to see how that number compares with other forms of media consumption like movie theaters and newspapers.

Though it might seem small, the inclusion of video search in Google Alerts could be big. Sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference, especially when it's Google that does them. I'm willing to guess that there are as many or more people in this world who use the Google Alerts system as there are who knowingly read RSS feeds in a reader. While that makes me shudder on principle, any progress for a "publish and subscribe" paradigm instead of a "broadcast and hope they come" approach is good news in my book.

When video consumption numbers continue to rise, it will be because of small steps like this one, increasing the accessibility of the medium.

Yahoo! claims it is the first portal to enable such "an immersive video experience" directly on its home page. The following two screenshots indicate how it works. The first is the homepage with new video module, and the second is what happens if you click 'play video' on the Daily Show image:

The new video features are very nicely implemented, although I did have trouble using it in Firefox on a Mac (worked fine on Safari). Yahoo.com is also lucky to have exclusive videos from Daily Show correspondent Rob Riggle as he covers the war from Iraq. Not to be missed :-)

In total, the average viewer watched about 135 video clips. While full-length shows are becoming more popular, it is still important to note that the average video is only 3.7 minutes long. Hulu, which focuses on full-length TV shows, also recorded its best month yet, with 457 million views.

Another Record-Breaking Month

June, according to comScore, already broke most records, but at that time, the company credited the surge to the large number of high-profile events (including the death of Michael Jackson and the elections in Iran). ComScore argues that TV viewers are turning to the Internet right now because most of the shows on TV are currently on summer hiatus. While this probably plays some role in this current growth in interest in online video, we would also argue that a lot of viewers are simply changing their viewing habits and have moved away from watching shows on traditional TV and cable networks. Instead, they are watching popular clips on YouTube and full-length shows on Hulu.