Online video streams surpass 10 billion last month

Nielsen: Total Video Streams Top 10 Billion [NewTeeVee]  

President Obama's inauguration had a significant impact on the number of web users streaming video last month. Nielsen's January Video Census, released yesterday, reports that 1 billion individual videos were streamed online last month by 135 million users. That's an increase of around 900 million streams over the December totals. 

Sites like CNN.com capitalized on their live streaming of the presidential inaugural ceremony. CNN increased from 95.5 million streams in December to 152 million video streams in January. YouTube maintained a wide lead among all sites serving up streaming video, serving well over half of all videos viewed on the web - 5.8 billion videos viewed by 92 million unique web viewers. 

The popular long-form streaming site Hulu streamed 232 million streams for only 7.7 million viewers. Though Hulu doesn't have a relatively large user base, they sure are loyal. By my math, each visitor to the Hulu site viewed an average of 30 videos. 

With Hulu recently removing itself from the Boxee open-source video interface, I wonder whether there will be a drop off in Hulu's numbers when Nielsen releases it's February Video Census. Whether the answer is yes or no, video streaming is here to stay and all ISP's have lots of work in front of them to be ready for the dramatic increase in bandwidth consumption it will require.