The statistics from comScore reveal that 80 per cent of the UK online population "initiated" a video stream in April 2007, compared to 76 per cent in the US, 79% in France and 70 per cent in Germany. In the UK, users spent 10 per cent of their total time online viewing video online.
Andrew Wilding, European MD, Vividas, commented: “The results of this study are interesting but not surprising. The rise in the use of video streaming has been steady, growing more noticeably over the last six months due to the saturation of UGC sites such as YouTube.
“The bigger story is that streaming is now clearly the viewing method of choice. This research shows that consumers are picking up on the fact that streaming is the better option when compared to downloading clips, as it allows instant viewing on video which download services just cannot deliver."
Bob Ivins, EVP and managing director of comScore Europe, said: “With eight out of 10 people initiating a stream in the UK, streaming is clearly mainstream and one of the more popular things to do online – up there with search, email and shopping.”
Ivins added that those UK users are accessing 16 to 18 video streams more, per month, than their counterparts in the US, France or Germany. This could indicate that the UK is further along the adoption curve in using streamed video.
The study also reported on the most popular streaming sites. Of the 1.98 billion streams that were initiated in the UK in April 2007, 38 per cent or 608.1 million were initiated with Google or its subsidiary sites, including YouTube.com.
Also featuring in the top five were Yahoo sites, with 57.7 million streams, BBC sites with 32.2 million streams, Fox Interactive Media with 26.1 million streams and Microsoft sites with 17.3 million streams.
.jpg)
.jpg)