Here We Are Now Inter-taining

It’s already an established fact for many that online videos have become the most popular form of entertainment especially if we consider the numerous resource sites available. Certainly, you’ve got BitTorrent, Usenet and P2P, but still they may be addressed to a somewhat experienced user. Thus, a rather convenient alternative to p2p that has lately gained a lot of ground are the streaming sites. You can easily access them and check out the material you’re interested in.

To give you an idea about how high the demand for these resources has got we’ll present you with the recent results from comScore study. As the study shows, U.S. watched 558 million hours of online video during July which actually translates into18.6 million hours a day. Taken the current trend and the way things evolve, by the end of September we may expect an increase of up to 20 million a day.

Like there would be anyone not guessing yet – the master of online video streaming is Google's YouTube. comScore reveals that people accessed around 5 billion videos in July. Unthreatingly following YouTube is Fox Interactive Media (with 445 million videos served). The other contenders - Microsoft, Yahoo, and Viacom – have to be satisfied for the time being with only 200 million videos served.

Although the difference gets smaller if we take a look at the "unique viewership" market, the leader is kept - Google's YouTube carries the flag with 92 million unique visitors, while Fox gathers 54.8 million unique viewers.

From these numbers here we can at least conclude that the movie and video entertainment industry look forward to a much brighter future in terms of online distribution than the record industry. You can imagine the relief of those movie industry moguls…