• 50% of Internet users now watch online video weekly or more;
• That’s up from 43% in 2009;
• An additional 5 percentage points growth is expected in the next 12 months;
• Younger male viewers top the list as a category with 85% of males 18-24 watching online video weekly; and
• 38% are interested in the prospect of connecting their computers to TV to watch online video.

Android Wants In On the Mobile Video Rush — Granted, Apple’s getting on the lines, press (both good and bad) and attention recently on their video capabilities. But, when I saw this piece at Connected Planet on what Android is up to in video I thought I’d be contrarian and talk about that instead. To quote the article “While the latest version of Apple’s iconic device is designed for generating video content and communications, the Droid X’s powerful hardware core and new services gear the device toward consuming massive amounts of video content as well as producing it.” Verizon calls the device “a pocket sized home theater”. So, another example of a blur between computers, phones and TVs. Online video is everywhere.  So whether you’re a Apple or Android fan, the good news is they are both going after video if you’re an online video fan.

Happy 4th: And in closing, I embed a video from UStream.tv of fireworks at the Magic Kingdom. Happy birthday all you Americans!

I’ve always said that .tv is synonymous with online video, and it’s great to see another example of that being true. When you watch the video below, you’ll hear some great quotes about how TechCrunch wanted to develop their own channel on the web (“not just a flip cam”) to showcase their writers, the different people who pass through their offices and their original content. Besides using a .tv site to get their online video discovered, they are also using the Ustream.tv platform for their videos – which is a .tv two-fer!

Watch the video to hear what the TechCrunch folks have planned, get a tour of their studio, and see how they occupy the online video intersection between Justin Bieber, kittens, and the iPad.

Internet Video Viewing to Eclipse Broadcast TV Viewing by 2020.
A forecast by The Diffusion Group (TDG) in one of their recent reports. According to Colin Dixon, senior partner and co-author of TDG’s new report, despite the fact that some people might find this news a bit shocking, there is good reason to believe that this estimate is realistic.

Dixon says, “Keep in mind that during this period, Internet and broadcast delivery of video content will become blended in such a way that consumers will be unaware of which conduit serves which content. Because so much of their audience will be consuming online, it is more important than ever that cable and broadcast channels increase their presence online.”

Online Video Ad Revenue To Top $1.3B.
This prediction is from Parks Associates, by way of Online Media Daily. They also say “The report attributes the healthy numbers to steady growth in online video viewership, combined with the ability to target specific viewers based on preferences and viewing history”.

When asked why .tv, they said they use .tv because people expect there to be video attached to it and for it to be fun. So watch the video below to hear from the founders of one of the largest video sites on the web, Justin.tv.

• The duration of the average online video rose 23% in a year to 4.3 minutes.
• The percentage of the US population that watched an video online rose 7.6 percentage points from 75.5% to 83.1%.
• The videos viewed on YouTube grew by 124% to nearly 12B (yes that’s “B” for billions) video’s a month in the US.
• In 2009, Facebook wasn’t on the top 10 list of properties by Unique Viewers. In February it’s ranked number 7 with 36MM viewers.

One thing that hasn’t changed in the year though — for all the growth in video on the web — it’s still got a very long tail. In February of 2009 the top 10 properties by videos viewed made up 57.5% of the total videos. In February 2010 that top 10 list lost 2.3 percentage points to only 55.3%. This leaves lots of room for .tv! Great things to come in the video revolution.

In the video David speaks about the importance of online video and how success “first and foremost is going to boil down to the content”.  Check out the video and learn more about the business of making people laugh.

YouTube Launches Auto Caption For All Videos: As reported on this blog back in November, Google started auto captioning their videos. It started with educational videos, but just extended it this week to all English videos. What does this mean for video on the web? Well besides being accessible to the deaf, it also helps immensely with search. If you have the text of the words spoken, then search algorithms can find and sort videos much better. The online video history is only at the beginning, with many more changes to come.

Vote for .tv In the Streamy Awards: No, .tv isn’t up for an award directly. But, the nominations came out this week (streamed live by Ustream.tv) and .tv shows up 14 times in the various awards categories [warning, not all have a "G" rating]. From the Streamy Awards site, here is a description of their work

“The Streamy Awards is the first and most prestigious awards ceremony devoted to honoring excellence in original web television programming and those who create it. The annual ceremony, and its live online broadcast, brings together top talent, decision-makers and influencers shaping the online entertainment industry. Awards are presented for the past years’ finest achievements in a variety of categories spanning multiple disciplines, including Performance, Directing, Writing, Editing, Visual Effects, Sound, and more.”

As they say in that “other” awards show…and the .tv nominees are:

Best Drama Web Series

Compulsions.tv

OzGirl.tv (who I see is using Blip.tv…so another mention)

Best News or Political Web Series

Obama’s War on VBS.tv

Best Foriegn Web Series

OzGirl.tv (representing Australia)

Best Animated Web Series

Ellie’s Dirty Jokes on GoPotato.tv

Best Branded Entertainment Web Series

TheTempLife.tv

Best Directing for a Drama Series

Compulsions.tv

Best Female Actress in a Comedy Series

Sex Ed on KoldCast.tv

Best Male Actor in a Drama Series

Compulsions.tv

Best Female Actress in a Drama Web Series

OzGirl.tv

Best Visual Effects in a Web Series — The Crew

TheCrew.tv

Best Live Production in a Web Series

Coin-Op.tv

Fantasy Live Football using Ustream.tv

Twit.tv

Best Product Integration in a Web Series

(Kodak) on WokeUpDead.tv

Best of luck to the nominees!

Muzu.tv Signs Lucrative New Deals –Thanks to www.everything.tv for pointing out this announcement on Muzu.tv. They announced a number of deals to distribute their music videos with AOL, Bebo, and the Telegraph Media Group. among others. The Irish based company says it’s traffic is “growing at 20-30 per cent month on month” and “is serving more than 14 million music related videos in the UK every month.” Music videos are a hot category and go great with .tv

Justin.tv Makes it Easier To Go Live — Last week www.justin.tv rolled out a new version of its broadcasting tools. Cnet is quoting that ” a simple change has led to a 700 percent increase in the number of people who make it from clicking the “broadcast” button on Justin.tv’s front page to actually beginning a live stream.” Those are impressive stats.

Ustream.tv Gets Money to Go East — They announced $20MM in initial funding with an option for $55MM more. That’s real money. What do they plan to do with that? Tech Crunch says “money will be used to expand on the other side of the world, particularly Japan (obvious, given the SoftBank involvement), China, Korea, and India. Mobile video is particularly hot in some of the Asian countries”. At the $75MM mark, the smart money is saying Ustream.tv is worth $230MM.

Vator.tv Splash — This past Thursday Vator.tv launched their event for early stage start ups to pitch their companies to over 300 investors, founders and members of the press. The 10 finalist are listed here. It’s an interesting group with a number of the companies involved in online video. Congratulations to Vator.tv

Online Video to Become Mainstream in 2010 — Speaking of VCs, our friends at Beet.tv interviewed Ross Levinsohn, former digital chief at News Corp and now a venture capitalist at Fuse Capital. Seems his company gets a pretty wide view of whats coming next, looking at over 500 companies a year. When asked what trends he saw, he was bullish on online video — saying it will become mainstream in 2010 — even admitting some already say it is that.

CSB will stream the pre-game, and there’s lots of sites where you can view the commercials via online video. According to Nielsen, the commercials are what a bare majority of us prefer anyway “Fifty-one percent of those questioned said they most enjoy the commercials that air throughout the game when compared to the Super Bowl game itself.” And, speaking of super bowl ads, CBS said it sold out it’s commercials as of Monday, with 30 second spots running from $2.5MM to more than $3 million for each; with a total of $200MM spent on Super Bowl ads.

So if you’re in the 51% majority, here’s a fun .tv site that bills itself as the “worlds largest archive of Super Bowl commercials” with 33 years worth of them — www.adland.tv. I may be boring, but my favorite commercial is still Apple’s 1984 ad.

And, speaking of .tv sites and Super Bowl advertising, Gatorade is showing live video via Ustream.tv of athletes testing at a performance lab in Miami in advance of  their Super Bowl marketing efforts. They are hosting pro football players for the rest of the week and inviting people to view the videos. It’s a great example of a major brand integrating video and .tv into their larger social campaign leading up to Super Bowl activity. It’s also a great example of how things you don’t normally associate with video (sports drinks) still work great for online video.

So who do I want to win the game? Well I was born in Baltimore, so I could never root for a team that was stolen in the middle of the night (watch a Barry Levinson movie and you’ll know what I mean). New Orleans has had it rough of late, so I think they deserve it. According to the latest Vegas spread; I’m continuing a tradition of rooting for the underdog.

As has been the case in this Internet era, the technology community has risen to the cause and is helping where it can. There are thousands of tweets at the hashtag Haiti (#Haiti). In many languages there’s tweets of fundraising efforts, status on the relief activities, and even a few notices of people in Haiti informing their followers they are alive and fine. I joined a LinkedIn group that was set up to help people find ways to volunteer and assist. Google Earth, along with GeoEye, has before and after satellite views. And, in just the short time since the earthquake, over $7MM has been raised by texting to organizations like the Red Cross. That’s $7MM done in mostly small $5 and $10 increments. But added together, those small amounts make it the largest texting fundraiser in history. One place to text and donate is by texting the word “HAITI” to “90999″ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.

As you donate, however you do it, be sure to check if your employer will match your donations. Here at VeriSign we have a program called VeriSign Cares which supports employee volunteerism and giving. I made my donation online and VeriSign will match it to support those organizations helping Haiti recover. I look forward to seeing those videos — of a recovered Haiti.