online video

Quiz time.

How many videos were watched on YouTube in May this year? Was it 1.4 million? 14 million? Or 140 million?

Actually it’s a trick question. The answer is a mind numbing 14.6 billion. And that’s just the number watched by American residents!

According to figures just released, May was a record month for YouTube with the average visitor watching 100 videos. YouTube now accounts for 43 percent of all video viewed online.

While British politics has failed to really exploit digital media in 2010, the internet, and especially online video, continues to have a growing impact on our “real” lives and businesses.

New figures from the respected agency Comscore show people in the UK watched 37% more online video compared with the year before.

We Brits are now watching more than five and a half million online videos a month compared with four million last year.

YouTube is of course the biggest player, but Facebook reported a 205% increase in the number of video views while the BBC reported a 143% increase.

She was waiting for a train and was day dreaming for a moment. That was when she noticed the pram, with her baby inside, was slowly rolling towards the edge of the platform. It’s a moment of sheer horror. She lurches forward, but can’t reach the pram as it topples over the edge onto the tracks below. A moment later the train arrives; crunching into the pram and breaking it into pieces.

It happened in Australia two weeks ago. But because the incident was captured on CCTV and the video posted on YouTube; millions of people around the World have already watched the drama unfold.

Hands up if you use YouTube? Wow, that's a lot of hands! According to Comscore, US YouTube users alone down-loaded 14.8 billion online videos during March 2009 an increase of 4% on December's record figures. Their survey found there are now well over 100 million Youtube users per month and it's growing.
But how many of us are downloading video from YouTube as well as watching it? No-one knows, but if one in ten users also download, then that's half a billion daily downloads, 20 million downloads an hour, 3,400 downloads a second. Or it was until today.