Online Video Surges: 11.2 Billion Video Streams in July

FROM: http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/nielsen-july-video/

We thought that online video usage growing by 53 percent was impressive back in May. New numbers released today from Nielsen really put that growth into perspective though.
According to the information and media company, online video usage continued to see strong month-over-month and year-over-year growth. In fact, online video is still ballooning at a current rate of 31% per year in the US. That translates to 11.2 billion total streams in July alone.
That’s nearly double the population of the entire world. Let that sink in for a moment: two videos for every person on the planet, and all of these views were generated just inside the US.

That isn’t the only eye-popping number to come out of Nielsen today, either. There were 135.9 million unique viewers of online video in the last month. If you do the math, that means that the average viewer watched 82.4 streams in July. The numbers also indicate that the average viewer watched online video for 211 minutes during the month. Here’s the data:

+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
|                         |   Jul-09   | Year-Over | Month-Over |
|                         |            |   -Year   |   -Month   |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| Unique Viewers (000)    |  135,977   |   14.2%   |    1.2%    |
| Total Streams (000)     | 11,200,093 |   31.4%   |   11.1%    |
| Streams per Viewer      |    82.4    |   15.1%   |    9.7%    |
| Time per Viewer (min)   |   211.6    |   42.2%   |   12.1%    |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+

When you break down online video by service, there are a few surprises. First, the obvious one: YouTube was #1 with 7 billion total streams and about 104 million unique viewers. Hulu was second with 383.7 streams, but with only 10.3 million viewers. That translates to the average Hulu user watching 37 clips or TV shows in July. Clearly Hulu is able to engage users, but it still doesn’t have the reach of YouTube, or even of Yahoo (265 million streams, 30 million viewers) or MSN/Microsoft (188 million streams, 17.8 unique viewers).

+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| Video Brand                                     |   Total   | Unique  |
|                                                 |  Streams  | Viewers |
|                                                 |   (000)   |  (000)  |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| YouTube                                         | 7,010,772 | 104,541 |
| Hulu                                            |  383,779  | 10,299  |
| Yahoo!                                          |  265,570  | 29,948  |
| MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                            |  187,994  | 17,790  |
| Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network             |  179,666  |  7,251  |
| Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network |  155,075  |  7,930  |
| Fox Interactive Media                           |  151,622  | 14,692  |
| MTV Networks Music                              |  119,101  |  6,887  |
| CNN Digital Network                             |  109,221  | 11,680  |
| Blinkx                                          |  86,398   |   268   |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+

Online video’s growth is storming ahead. Our eyeballs might as well be glued to our computer screens.