But imagine what will happen to mobile streaming video as the next generation of high-speed wireless networks and devices become the norm.

But wireless infrastructure is about to take a leap forward as two so-called 4G technologies - LTE (Long Term Evolutions) and WiMAX - roll out. Sprint and its partner Clearwire plan to cover 120 million customers with high speed, Internet-anywhere WiMAX access by 2010, a technology that with upgrades could rival LTE speeds.

Mobile Web use mirrors fixed Web use, said Joel Brand, VP of product management at Bytemobile. About 75% of 3G Web users are connecting with laptops and netbooks, he said, with the rest accessing on smartphones. A full third of video on these devices is delivered by YouTube, he said, another third is from adult content sites and the last third comes from a broad mix of sources.

Next generation networks will certainly encourage the popularity of video, but it will probably also change the way we watch. For short, expedient, low-definition videos, YouTube is king. But higher mobile Web speeds will encourage users to seek longer, high-definition videos from services like Netflix and Hulu.

Higher speeds also mean live-streaming services like Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream and Qik become more a lot more usable. Faster speeds will encourage individual users to stream more video, made even easier because so many users accessing via laptops or with Apple devices that have front-facing cameras. Livestreaming sites will also see huge opportunities for broadcasting live events like concerts, sports games or newscasts to users who can't watch at home in front of their TVs.

The next generation of wireless networks will surely see more users accessing video - but it's likely that a lower percentage of it will be from YouTube. Do you stream video on your phone? How do you see yourself using video as mobile wireless speeds get faster?

Photo by Giorgio Montersino

When YouTube Live launches later this year, this medium is only going to get bigger.

The company says that these 10 million uniques come from the whole UStream network, which presumably includes embedded players. Third party traffic analysts Quantcast says that UStream participates in its traffic monitoring program (using embed codes) and reports that the UStream global network gets just under 8 million uniques as far as it's concerned. UStream says Quantcast is new to them and will take some time to catch up in its reporting. That may be a viable explanation, but the numbers are close enough. UStream also reports that their number equals 10 million people actually playing a live video stream - not people who have loaded pages that happen to have an unplayed UStream player embedded in them. It also doesn't include views of recorded videos. That's impressive.

Competitor Mogulus also uses Quantcast, and Quantcast says they have a global network that sees 4.5 million uniques.

Those are serious numbers. We've argued for some time that live video was going to be big, but the pace of growth is a little bit surprising. Note also that UStream was established just over a year ago, in March of 2007. When we reported this week that social news site Mixx hasn't been able to surpass 1 million unique visitors per month in their first year despite links from every story on CNN.com, USAToday, Weather.com and a list of other major media sites - we said there was an integration or audience targeting problem. UStream's 10 million and Mogulus's 4.5 million monthly uniques are what new media technologies look like when they really start to catch on.