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That streaming videos makes up a huge percentage of the Internet's traffic is by now well-known. Netflix alone makes up nearly 30% of all downstream traffic and we're now accustomed to hearing about the extraordinary amount of bandwidth eaten up by videos streaming during major news events.

For example, during President Obama's inauguration, content delivery network Akamai delivered 7 million simultaneous streams of video, with traffic surpassing two terabytes per second (Tbps), which broke records. The next year, Akamai's network traffic peaked at about 3.45 Tbps.

Next week (October 28 and 29) Microsoft will host its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on its sprawling Redmond, WA campus. Typically, PDC - which the company only organizes when it wants to talk about major platform developments - is held at a larger venue, but Microsoft decided to hold it on its own campus this year. While this makes for a more intimate setting, it also means that fewer developers will be able to attend in person. To make up for this, Microsoft is putting the technology it developed for streaming live video from live events like the Vancouver Olympics and NBC Sunday Night Football to use in covering its own developer conference.

For as long as I can remember, Blockbuster Video has been the nation-wide go-to spot to rent movies. Some of my earliest movie experiences as a child involved movies my family rented from Blockbuster. When the popularity of online music downloads began shuttering music stores, the world realized that Blockbuster's days were similarly numbered. Now it seems that number is quickly approaching zero as the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that an impending bankruptcy could be as close as a few weeks away for the video and game rental giant.

Dyyno, which allows its users to stream and record live video from any application on their desktops, is launching a major upgrade of its service today. The company's service will now allow users to stream live and recorded video streams in full 1080p HD resolution. Dyyno has also dropped the price for personal accounts - which can stream HD video - to zero. These personal account support up to 100,000 concurrent viewers. Previously, these accounts started at $10 per month.

Over the last few months, TinyChat has established itself as a highly popular video chat service. Today, the company launched a new product, TinyChat.tv, which competes directly with established companies like Ustream and Stickam. Signing up and getting started with TinyChat.tv only takes a minute. Users can customize their video chat rooms with different themes, background images and colors. The old TinyChat.com, which doesn't require signups, will continue to work, though users will get access to more features on TinyChat.tv.

Not too long ago, Joost was the poster child for the online video revolution. It featured a slick desktop player with innovative controls, good video quality, and it was developed by the team behind Skype and Kazza. It seemed like nothing could go wrong here, but somehow, Joost never managed to get any traction and after the first hype had died down, most users just abandoned the desktop player for in-browser video portals like YouTube and Hulu. After a long delay, Joost finally abandoned its desktop player strategy, but the company never managed to attract a large enough user base.

Today, Joost announced that it is mostly abandoning its original strategy and that the company will focus on offering white label video solutions for media companies and distributors instead.

A new report (PDF) from the Council for Research Excellence functions as a good reminder to those of us who spend a lot of time on the web that we can often have a rather skewed view of how the rest of the world consumes media. If you are reading this, there is probably a good chance that you watch a lot of video online, or that you record your TV shows on your DVR and fast-forward through ads.

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.

A few months ago, we reviewed Tinychat, an easy to use web app for creating on-demand chatrooms with close connections to Twitter. Today, Tinychat relaunches with a number of very cool features, including video chats with up to 12 people, recording, screen sharing, and a Facebook application for video chats on Facebook. The new version of Tinychat keeps a lot of the features that we liked in the text-only version (no need to sign up, very easy to use, vanity room names), and adds the new video features on top of that.

Ustream, the live video streaming service that hit the mainstream recently thanks to a litter of Shiba Inu puppies, just announced Watershed, a new white-label streaming video service. Watershed features pay-as-you-go pricing, high-definition video, and extensive options to customize the viewers' experience.

According to QuickPlay Media, a leading provider of mobile TV and video solutions for cell phone carriers in the U.S. and Canada, video streaming to mobile devices became significantly more popular in the last quarter of 2008. Across QuickPlay's network, the number of streams viewed in the fourth quarter of 2008 more than doubled from the previous quarter, while video downloads increased by almost fifty percent.