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Did you know that almost half of the TV shows that are recorded are played back on the same day? How about that the average Netflix customer watches five TV shows and four movies a week? Or that (no real surprise here) visits to video streaming and sharing sites continue to climb?

A new infographic from G+/Gerson Lehrman Group shows these and a few other interesting trends too. For example, Dell was able to cut service calls by posting video how-tos on its support site. This and other TV oddities can be found below.

Who needs a big, expensive Web-connected television when there are so many other ways to stream content from the Internet to your living room? There are a variety of boxes and plug-ins that users can acquire to get the Web running on their TVs. One of the leaders in the space, Roku, has taken the notion a step farther. Roku is throwing out the notion of the box. Instead, stream movies and shows to your TV just by plugging in a stick.

The Roku Streaming Stick is intended to give users all the functionality of a Smart TV without any boxes or cables. It can be controlled by a TV remote and offer most (but not all) of the features that a Roku player can offer. Internet TV is going to be a maturing market vertical in 2012 and on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, we are starting to see how the space will evolve in the new year.

This week we're reviewing five trends that have helped define 2011. So far we've covered online privacy, group messaging and HTML5. Today we're looking at a still emerging trend, but one which is (pardon the pun) very much worth watching: second screen apps. By that we mean apps that run on your smartphone or tablet device and complement your television viewing.

Over 2011, second screen apps have continued their push into the living room. Watching TV used to be a passive activity, but now the Web and devices like Android phones and the iPad have made it interactive.

Comcast is looking to try to beat the online video sites at their own game. According to The Wall Street Journal, the cable provider is testing how to deliver live television over Internet protocol to better enable itself to do battle with the likes of iTunes, Hulu, Amazon and Netflix in a trial run at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall.

When giants walk, all others be wary. Comcast's goal is to bring live television to any device that can access the Internet. Its test will be available to MIT students who will be able to watch video on any device this fall. Is this what consumers have been waiting for? Who better to do it than a cable company with a giant infrastructure and content distribution broadcast rights?

Visa announced today it will launch a next-generation digital wallet service which aims to revolutionize electronic payments, including those made online, on a mobile phone, or offline at the point-of-sale. The platform allows consumers to create a digitized version of their actual wallet, in which they load all their cards, whether Visa or not. Even merchant loyalty cards will be supported.

When making a purchase on the Web, this new system offers a click-to-purchase functionality that does away with the long, tedious form filling currently necessary on the websites belonging to online merchants. Instead, a username and password will be all that's required to complete a purchase. Offline at retailers' locations, the mobile wallet will support the use of promo codes sent via SMS, barcode scanning and NFC technology, the latter which allows a customer to pay with a wave of their phone instead of with a swipe of a plastic card.

Internet TV platform Roku announced today that it has reached 15 million channel downloads from the more than one million people on its service. Roku's growth has been spurred by its expanding selection of entertainment channels and the company's recent move into U.S. retail stores.

Roku is simple and as a platform it is cheap. There are three options available ranging from $59.99 to $99.99 and consumers pay for the subscriptions they use through it, like Netflix or Hulu Plus. Roku now has 225 entertainment channels including paid and free services for music and video. The average Roku user downloads 15 channels.

Roku, the little box that brings streaming Internet content to your television screen, announced two additions today that bring the Internet TV device to a new level. A device like Roku can be judged both in terms of what content it natively supports and how it connects to other devices to make content sharing easy.

Today's announcements by the company work to increase the device on both levels, connecting it both to content you won't find on many TV networks and to the other device in your room - your computer!.

One of the big drawbacks to most Internet TV systems is that the viewer has to actually make a choice, rather than sitting back and letting the glorious glow of cable TV wash over them. Roku, a simple device that brings Internet content like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Video-on-Demand to your television, has just taken the first step in bringing that mouth-agape, passive viewing back to your Internet TV experience.

Roku and WealthTV have announced that the channel will begin streaming its continuous streaming content alongside on-demand content over Roku devices. The move marks some of the first mirrored streaming of cable content over an Internet TV device and could signal a shift in what we expect from our Internet TV experience.

Looking back on the year in Web technology, we can see that several product categories have evolved significantly over 2010. We've already written about App Stores and eReaders. Another market that progressed in 2010 was Internet TV. Among the developments: Apple announced a major overhaul of Apple TV, Google launched its Android-powered Google TV platform and partnered with Sony, Boxee and Roku continued to improve their set-top box products, startups like Clicker innovated new types of web services for Internet TV, and content platforms like Hulu captured more viewers.

In this post we review the Internet TV market over 2010 and highlight the big stories of the year.

In this reemergence of the Internet-enabled TV (remember Web TV of the 90's?), there is a land battle over screen real estate. Web browsers are free to watch recent episodes of nearly any TV show on their computer, simply by going to a network's website. Can they go to these same websites using Internet TV devices like Google or Apple TV, though? Surely not.

One startup, called Snapstick, is introducing a solution that is device and screen agnostic, meaning whatever content you wish, from whatever device, brought straight to the big screen in your living room.