Streaming Video Market Heating Up

Nielsen has published its December 2011 rankings of the top online video destinations in the U.S. According to the data, 164.3 million unique U.S. viewers streamed over 22 billion videos, spending on average more than 5 hours each watching online video. YouTube was the top video brand once again with 131.4 million unique U.S. viewers. Other notable websites in the top 10 were Yahoo! (third place, with 36.7 million viewers); Facebook (fourth, 23.5 million); Hulu (eighth, 19.3 million) and ESPN Digital Network (ninth, 16.7 million). In terms of total streams, however, the rankings shift a little. While YouTube still is far and away the top destination with over 13 billion videos streamed during December 2011, Hulu came in second with 756.9 million videos streamed. Other notable streaming entities on this list include Netflix (sixth place, 251.8 million videos streamed) and Comcast (eighth, 216.5 million). And finally, when it comes to time spent per viewer, Netflix users in the U.S. spent an average of 10 hours and 7 minutes watching video content on Netflix in December 2011, ranking it first by a seven-hour margin over second-place Hulu.