Online Video Viewing Soars 37% Year Over Year In The UK

Sure, the US is seeing something of a sputter in the online video growth curve. In fact it's sort of flatlined recently, but while that might be the case, our English-speaking counterparts across the big pond are seeing some expansion in their online video viewing thanks to Facebook and TV being put online.

comScore Video Metrix found that there was a 37% growth in UK online video viewing Feb 09 to Feb 2010. They managed to consume something like 5.5B streams. YouTube reigns supreme of course and it should be no surprise that the BBC followed up second with a massive 143% change (mostly due to it's iPlayer). Megavideo is pulling in 103% more this year and Facebook showed an astounding 205% growth. Other big winners on the year are ITV, Blinkx (204%) and Sky (they are a satellite broadcasting, sports, news, etc).

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video. Growth for Top 10 Sites not fastest growing sites within category.

The BBC could probably see huge gains in video streams if they weren't so Hulu-like in their own insanely tight-gripped management of their properties. In fact, even though they asked me to be in the iPlayer beta, I could not see the content as I'm outside the country (but still in the EU).

Channel 4 also is restrictive of its content, much of which is syndicated from America with shows like How I Met Your Mother, Jon Stewart, The Cleveland Show, 90210 and Desperate Housewives as well as some of their own shows.

Facebook on the other hand busted through the 200% mark (along with Blinkx) and had a good 41.4M videos in the month while Blinkx had 28.8M.

Mark Cuban, from HDNet, called Facebook the New Internet, the place we go to kill time when we've got some of it to do so with. He believes that it could continue to grow due to its social sharing and different content discovery and become a major force, perhaps even starting to bite into the top dogs shares.

With growth numbers like that it's certainly going to be an interesting rest of 2010. Google and Youtube only showed 17% growth with the overall being 37%. Along with Microsoft and Channel 4, they're the only sites that didn't really build on their video views. That could mean that they won't continue to grow and could start to slip out of the Top Ten altogether. Well, except for Google who is still number one with 50% of all videos viewed.