Australia, like the rest of the world, is watching online video in increasingly large numbers and for longer periods of time.
Online video has become an integral part of the Internet, even though it’s a fairly recent innovation. Most of us can remember a time when the idea of watching video online was just a pipe dream. But video now appears on most websites in some form or another, and assuming your Internet connection is up to it can of extremely high quality.
There are various forms of online video: user-generated content that appears on sites such as YouTube, professional content such as catch-up TV services which appear on television networks’ websites, live video streaming such as that seen on the likes of Justin.tv and Ustream.
Australia is following suit with most other nations in watching a great deal of online video, according to the latest usage figures from comScore (via The Australian).
Four out of five, or 81 percent, of Australians who are online now watch videos on the Web. That’s around 10.7 million people, who between them viewed 970 million videos during the month of July 2010. Each of these people watched an average of seven hours of video, which means online video as a whole cannot quite compete with Facebook, which soaks up an average eight hours a month from the average user.
The most popular online video site by far is YouTube, which accounts for 55.5 percent (539 million clips) of all videos viewed. Microsoft comes in second on three percent (29.6 million clips), mainly thanks to NineMSN. Facebook rounds out the top three with 1.3 percent (12.5 million clips) of all videos viewed.
These figures suggest that the $25 million reportedly spent on online video advertising during the last financial year is not nearly enough, and that Australian advertisers are missing out on what is a huge (and still growing) market.
