Time and motion: online video

While Federal Reserve Governors continued to list inflation as their 2009 new year's resolution, at least one aspect of our lives into the new year is already rapidly inflating: the amount of time spent watching videos online.

Comscore released its numbers and the rise looks like this: a 40% jump in one year in the number of videos viewed online. In addition, the average length of a video viewed was a whopping 3.1 minutes. (See chart below or press release).

So what?

Google (which is YouTube) dominates...more than 5 Billion served in one month...followed by MySpace (which is the Fox Interactive Media number). But what the numbers also may be saying is this:

1. Broadband is enabling the rapid growth of video online.

2. Cheap digital video capture devices are continuing the growth of user-generated video online (prior post on mobile video here)

3. There is a role for professionally produced video online (via traditional network sites like Hulu, Disney, Turner) it just doesn't look like double-digit share online.

We've said it before, but if you are a network, you want all the content you can get your hands on. If you are a content producer, you want to be on the network with the broadest exposure...YouTube fits the bill. As does MySpace and certain others who let anyone be a content creator...

And in another irony of the online marketplace of ideas, some are even taking YouTube video to the big screen (see here)

Now, if the Fed, er, Google could just figure out how their YouTube debt can be monetized...