Justin.tv Part of Fund Raising in the UK: UK personality Tim Shaw is live on Justin.tv closed up in a box. He refers to it as Man in Box and he’s in there for 30 days unless using Google maps and clues, Brits find him before that. There’s a prize if you find him, and funds raised will go to Help for Heros (a UK organization that raises money for wounded soldiers). An interesting cross between reality tv on the web, helping veterans and .tv. Thanks Justin.tv!

Watch live video from Man In Box on Justin.tv
Cisco’s Predictions on Mobile Video: Cisco recently released one of their reports that tries to predict traffic into the future. They had a number of things about video that I thought were interesting:

• Almost 66 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2014.
• Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2009 and 2014.
• Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any application category measured within the Cisco VNI Forecast at this time.
• Video will be responsible for the majority of the traffic growth between 2009 and 2014.
• Overall mobile data traffic is expected to grow to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014, and over 2.3 of those are due to mobile video traffic.

ComScore Shows There’s Lots of Room for Video Sites: Yes, YouTube gets the majority of the traffic at 26% of time spent, but the next 24 spots only add an additional 22% according to a recent report from ComScore. That leaves over half of all time spent — 52% is in the tail. If you use videos watched as the metric, the second company on that list is already into low single digits (Hulu at 3%); and by the time you get to the 9th position on that list, you’re below single digits (CBS Interactive at .9%). So this story of video on the web is just beginning with lots of changes and growth to come. Great for .tv. Stay tuned.

Half of NetFlix’s Customers Stream to their TV: The Diffusion Group issued a press release on a report they recently did which says 1/2 – yes that’s 50% – of their large base is using the “Watch Instantly” option on their TVs. No, this isn’t the lone college student streaming to their laptop (though they do have that demographic too). This refers to someone who bothered to buy a box to make it easy, or hack a way to get the stream from the Internet onto a TV (full disclosure, I’m one of the box variety). What does this say for the over the top option for video on the web in the near future?

Now, I owned my Xbox long before the Netflix app was available. My friends bought it for me one Christmas several years ago because they were moving out of state so we could keep in touch. At the time I was skeptical (why would I want to get dominated online playing against tweens who were vastly superior at video games?) but in time I’ve grown to love the little white joy box in my living room. Skepticism aside, I would have run out and bought one myself immediately after Netflix launched their application to stream movies to your television.

The streaming video service is free to Netflix subscribers and uses all your current account (movie queue) information. This means that you don’t have to do anything special besides the one-time configuration when you download the app to your Xbox and your queue is immediately available. Now, not all Netflix videos are available – the last number I saw was around 12,000 movies & television shows – but I can tell you firsthand that Netflix is busily adding new content all the time. Random movies from my queue pop up on the Xbox app from time to time, which is truthfully akin to having random extra birthdays (I get excited easily, what can I say?).

In addition to constantly adding new content, they just released an update on the Xbox that adds cool new functionality like having the ability to watch videos in a ‘party’ – which means that I can watch terrible movies and offer MST3K-like commentary with friends in other states. Thank you Netflix, for removing the distance barrier from sharing terrible B-movie experiences with friends! I hear other things are either in the works or here now, like the ability in the app to choose from streaming movies not currently in your queue.

So, to wrap up this absurdly long blog post:

1. I’m a gamer.
2. Netflix + Xbox 360 = “teh awesomes” [its misspelled on purpose]
3. Streaming video, even in its infancy, it’s pretty pervasive.  And it’s only going to get better!

Fun fact: in Joystiq’s August 2009 interview with Steve Swasey (VP of Marketing for Netflix), Steve stated that “…more than one million Xbox gold members have watched more than a billion and a half minutes of movies and TV episodes via the Xbox 360.”