Nearly 150 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 96 videos per viewer in December. Google Sites surpassed 100 million online video viewers during the month, representing two out of every three Internet users who watched video. Fox Interactive ranked second with 56.9 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (42.8 million) and AOL LLC (31.5 million).

I wonder how these figures stack up against work time productivity during the holiday season?  Seriously though, It’s great to see U.S. web viewers adopting online video viewing habits, though i’d like to see the google domination drop and sites more well known for longer form content pick up some share in the market.

Other notable findings from December 2008 include:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

Don’t know what Internet enabled Television is?  Don’t worry, you will soon enough.  The geeks amongst us (hello friends) have been doing this for years, but CES this year is heralding a large amount of consumer friendly products and services that make watching video from the Internet on your living room TV.  Let’s face it – video has done an amazing job of leaping into the world of the web.  Even most grandmothers out there are now used to the idea of some funny video clips on the web being possible, even if they have no idea how it works(or why their grand kids insist on wasting so much time with them).  But web based content for most is still just that – bite size appetizers that tide you over between the big cable or satellite course every night (man I love metaphors).  Hulu has probably done the most to break that mold, by moving actual prime time content and movies onto the web in an easy to use, easy to operate format that has done a great deal to move office workers from hiding their private IM chats at work to hiding their TV viewing.

But the idea of moving that viewing back to the TV, while keeping the transmission of it Internet-based is like some sort of geek holy grail and broadcasters want in on it while your average TV watcher doesn’t even care (he just wants his shows).  Maybe this year might just be a perfect storm of technology, services, and general consumer knowledge of it all to make 2009 the year we learned how to cut the cable cord (man, I sound so optimistic there, don’t I?).  Mind you, that doesn’t mean we’re cutting the cord – just that we now know its actually possible.

Right now there is no official name for this, though “Internet enabled” as a catch phrase seems to get used often when describing it.  So what exactly am I talking about?  Well, this isn’t checking your email or your stock tips on your TV – I’m talking about using the Internet as the pipe to receive television content meant for playback directly on your living room set, not your computer.    This has been slowly creeping into our lives now for years, so it may not seem that radical;  the AppleTV, for example, for one has made it possible to watch content from the iTunes store for some time now.   But that is just one example and part of why it worked so well (for those who tried it, for it admittedly has a small segment fo the market) is that is was a closed network – with Apple controlling the content, the hardware, and the user interface.  In fact other than the broadband pipe, they were the whole ecosystem for delivering the video to your set top.  The the pipe may turn out to be one of the most crucial parts of this whole process, but more about that later – first let’s talk about the hardware, services, and know-how it takes to be one of the Internet TV pioneers.

This is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one – but its very important and a trend that will start seeping into the mainstream more and more thanks to the technology we saw announce last month at CES and services like Netflix extending into new platforms.

I’ll never get this out in one post (heck, I’ve been sitting on this draft for 2 weeks alone, much to Matt Smith’s chagrin) so let’s break this into a few chunks.  Consider this our tee up, and over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss the infrastructure, the hardware, the software, and all the various players already tromping around…

And as always, if you have something you actually want me to write about, please feel free to ask me questions.

Here’s the quote from Hulu.

Video quality is very important to us. We adjust the video bitrate between 480Kbps and 700Kbps depending on your bandwidth. Leveraging the H.264 capability of the new Flash Player 9, we also now offer a portion of our content in a higher resolution 1,000Kbps stream. Videos available in this format will display with a 480p Hi Res button on the lower right-hand side of the player. If you have sufficient bandwidth and Flash Player 9, click the button to view this high resolution stream. 

So the 360p content is most likely VP6 at 700kbps with a screen resolution of 480×360, while the 480p is H.264 at 1000kbps (or 1mbps) with a resolution of 640×480.   So what’s that mean quality wise?  Well, I decided to try a slightly better side by side than I did last time, so I chose an NBA game – pretty tough content to encode, given its a mix of high motion, wide shots, and a mix of video and graphics.  I created a short movie comparing the quality of each (see below for my methodology).  The screen shots you see below are scaled down examples of the side by side comparison (feel free to review the full size versions on my flickr account) or you can even see the video here.  You will notice the videos don’t line up perfectly.  I think iShowU was having a hard time keeping up with the frames on these captures, so they slide in and out of sync.  The fast motion certainly didnt help either, but as you can see, they are close enough to evaluate.  

To me, the H.264 is visibly better than the VP6 and its not just a matter of it being image artifacts.  The colors look noticeably better to be, as does the overall image luminosity.  All things considered, I’d much prefer to watch the 480p version than the 360p.

Methodology for Capturing and Comparing

I did a 960×540 screen capture of each video using iShowU and the Apple Intermediate Codec.  I then drop both clips in Final Cut Pro, synced then up on the timeline as best I could, then cropped then to spilt the screen evenly.  I then dropped a text label on each and exported at the sequence settings for review.  I did my screen captures from this version, then encoded the posted movie using QuickTime Pro and the AppleTV settings from my book.

Anyway, halfway through the show, i noticed a new buton on the tools roll over – a high res option (see it on the lower right hand of the image?). I hadn’t seen that before on a show as far as I know. In checking the Interweb, I did find mention of three different resolution options offered – 360p, 480p, and 720p. 480p would be equivalent to standard def tv, while 360p is a smaller, web friendlier option – and, of course, 720 is the smaller version of HD out on the market.

So, being me, I had to compare the 2 versions and I have to say, there was a noticeable difference in quality.

I took 2 screen captures while my laptop was set to full resolution (the way I normally view Hulu) to recreate my viewing experience. In this side by side comparison, the 360p version is on the left, while the 480p version is on the right. Now both are somewhat blocky and a bit blurry, but the 480p is clearly the the better quality option of the two. If you want to compare the full screen versions of each, they are here and here.

In addition to the image quality, the colors seem richer on the 480p version, though its tough to tell with al that glowy blue in the background.

Not sure what the rule is for while videos gets the higher res option, but i hope i find more video like this!