NEW YORK, NY - Although Internet video is still a tiny fraction of all video consumed -- somewhere around 2%, according to recent estimates -- activity still grows at a healthy double-digit percentage clip.

For last month, The Nielsen Co. says total online video streams grew 24.8% in September versus the same time period a year ago, to 11.02 billion streams. The time spent by viewers during the month was at 195.2 minutes, up the same 24.8% versus September 2008.

Both those measures, however, were down versus August's data: 3% in total streams and off 4.7% in the time per viewer per month.

Unique monthly September viewers also climbed year-to-year -- up 12.3% to 139.3 million. The number of streams per viewer also was up 11% to 79.1 average streams per month.

YouTube still commands over 50% of all video streams online in the U.S. -- totaling 6.7 billion -- and more than 76% of all unique viewers in the U.S. with 106 million.

Hulu.com is far back in second place -- with 437.4 million streams and 13.5 million users. Yahoo has a little more than half the number of streams of Hulu -- 228.5 million -- but over twice the unique monthly visitors, at 30.1 million.

Behind Hulu and Yahoo is MSN/WindowsLive/Bing and Fox Interactive Media. MSN has 180.1 million streams and 18.1 million uniques; Fox has 139.6 million streams and 14.3 million uniques.

Social-media company Facebook comes in 10th place overall in the number of streams -- at 110.4 million -- but is in third place for unique viewers of video, at 23.1 million.

Copyright 2009 MediaPost Communications. All rights reserved. From http://www.mediapost.com. By Wayne Friedman.
To view the Internet Travel Monitor Archive, click http://www.tripinfo.com/ITM/index.html.