While the Googlebot’s YouTube is a web video behemoth, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook nation have become an online video sleeping giant, and it may have just woken up. Facebook jumped to No. 3 behind established video powerhouses YouTube and Hulu in terms of total streams, according to Nielsen’s VideoCensus numbers for October. That’s up from No. 10 just last month. Facebook generated more than 217 million streams in October to more than 31.5 million unique viewers, up from 110 million streams to 23 million viewers in September. Get the full breakdown of Nielsen’s Top 10 and analysis over at NewTeeVee.

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: facebook, Video, YouTube

People will consume an exabyte — that’s 1 million terabytes — of information on mobile networks this year, predicts independent wireless analyst Chetan Sharma in his latest report, entitled “Managing Growth and Profit in the Yottabyte Era.” (A yottabyte is 1,000 billion terabytes.)  Sharma notes that Verizon reported more than 3,500 terabytes of traffic per month in 2008, a figure it says could explode to 4 million TB by 2014.

T-Mobile USA, meanwhile, has indicated that average mobile data consumption among its customers has shot up to 3.7 megabytes per user, per month, from just a few kilobytes a couple years back. That incredible growth in traffic will have to be managed by carriers if they want to maintain their profits.

But while Sharma notes that the growth in mobile broadband speeds will lead to more data consumption, what he doesn’t get into — but the chart below hints at — is that faster mobile broadband speeds will be the platform supporting the next generation of technology companies.

Ubiquitous, faster wired networks are what made Google a true advertising and search powerhouse. After all, when it took forever for a page to load on a 56K modem, you didn’t go to a search page to look for movie listings or settle bar bets online. Plus, fewer broadband subscribers meant a smaller audience to monetize through search advertising.

Social networking has been another beneficiary of faster speeds and greater adoption. With 1 Mbps connections (or better yet, 5 Mbps) checking in on Facebook or even Twitter is a quick and easy process. Faster speeds have resulted in more video online as well, leading to the creation of companies such as YouTube, Hulu and even Skype. We’re going to see a similar trend emerge in the mobile world, with companies that use the faster network plus mobility as the platform on which to build their businesses. And since mobile broadband has the potential to reach more people, there’s potential for innovation to come from all over the world.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  19 Comments
Tags: Cheta Sharma, facebook, GOOG, google, Hulu, skype, Twitter, YouTube

The protests in Iran that have come in the wake of the country’s June 13 election results, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, have showcased the rise of social media like Twitter, Facebook and even cell phone video taken in the streets and uploaded onto YouTube. Arbor Networks, a company that provides security and deep packet inspection equipment to ISPs, has taken a look at the implications of the conflict — not at the social media level, but at the packet level — and found that Iran’s web censorship is different from those of other regimes.

Whiles some governments block certain web sites with a heavy hand or cut off web access entirely, Iran has taken a far more subtle approach. The state-owned Data Communication Company of Iran (or DCI), which acts as the gateway for all Internet traffic entering or leaving the country, has slowed web access down to a crawl. The assumption is that DCI dialed back the bandwidth in order to better inspect which content and packets needed to be censored. Instead of viewing the packets through a fire hose, they turned the pipe into a garden hose so that equipment can sift through the packets and let legitimate traffic through. In a blog post today, Arbor Chief Scientist Craig Labovitch writes:

I can only speculate. But DCI’s Internet changes suggest piecemeal migration of traffic flows. Typically off the shelf / inexpensive Internet proxy and filtering appliances can support 1 Gbps or lower. If DCI needed to support higher throughput (say, all Iranian Internet traffic), then redirecting subsets of traffic as the filtering infrastructure comes online would make sense.

Indeed, web traffic was stopped following the election, then reopened, but at much lower levels. But this may prove to be a partial victory for web censorship, and an opportunity for some unscrupulous equipment vendor who wants to interest the Iranian government in better deep packet inspection equipment.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: Arbor Networks, facebook, iran, Twitter, YouTube

BT, the largest broadband provider in the UK, has said it plans to charge video content providers for the amount of bandwidth they consume on BT’s network, according to a story in Thursday’s Financial Times. The paper quotes John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business, saying, “We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect.”

BT last week was caught throttling connections to the BBC iPlayer to less than 1 megabyte per second between the hours of 5:00 p.m. and midnight for subscribers of its 8 Mbps service. That’s permitted under its terms of service, but it looks like BT wants more — from content providers like YouTube or Hulu. I don’t blame it. In any competitive market, subscribers would flee such prohibitive limits once they realized what was happening, leaving BT with lowered revenue. It would need to make that up somehow.

So now Petter is pulling out the usual ISP trope about content providers  “developing very profitable business models” using BT networks, and they should help subsidize the cost of the bandwidth the video content consumes. I’ve heard this from just about every ISP I’ve spoken with.

However, the content providers do pay for their bandwidth, as do the customers of the ISP who consume it. In many cases, video providers also contract with content delivery networks, which can help ISPs reduce the burden of the video files on the last-mile network connecting the consumer’s home to the ISP’s cable plant or central office. If video costs the ISP “many millions” as Petter tells the FT, then it should raise prices somewhere along the line rather than go into dangerous territory that sounds like  trading money for access:

He [Petter] said that the quid pro quo of payment from content owners might be guarantees of picture quality.

Maybe BT is all talk, but many ISPs would love to see a company get away with this, so they can try the same thing.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: BT, Hulu, iPlayer, YouTube

Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen a lot of new content offerings announced by companies like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube as they look to directly target the living room via entertainment devices. Indeed, the adoption rate of hardware devices like the Xbox 360, PS3, TiVo, Roku, VUDU, Apple TV and broadband-enabled Blu-ray players and TV sets will be crucial in determining if content owners can make money delivering video to the TV.

But despite all these new offerings, that content still only reaches a few million customers, a number largely unchanged from this time last year. Such low adoption rates in the face of so much effort leads me to think that while the market of delivering content to the TV will grow, it is unlikely to do so at the rate that many in this industry would like to believe. In fact I don’t think we’ll see these devices having a combined impact in any measurable way for at least another 3-4 years.

Here is a breakdown on the number of devices on the market and some data on the volume of content being consumed on them:

Xbox 360: Microsoft has so far sold 15.1 million Xbox 360 consoles in North America, according to NPD. Since the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace launched in November 2006, there have been more than 42 million downloads of entertainment content, which includes movies, TV shows, music videos and featured trailers, Redmond told me, while Xbox 360 owners have downloaded nearly 12.3 million hours of video content from the Xbox LIVE Video Store.

Xbox/Netflix: As of February, 1 million Xbox LIVE Gold members had downloaded and activated the application for streaming Netflix movies to the Xbox 360 console. Meanwhile, users had watched more than 1.5 billion minutes of movies and TV episodes from the Netflix Watch Instantly library.

TiVo: While TiVo doesn’t break out how many Series 1, 2 or 3 units have been sold individually, it has 1.6 million standalone TiVo subscribers. I estimate that 65 percent of those are Series 2, which means that there are roughly 525,000 Series 3 TiVos today. The company has said that 85 percent of its HD TiVos are connected via broadband, which puts the number of units capable of getting content via Amazon or Netflix at around 445,000. For DVRs that can get YouTube content the number is likely higher, since YouTube only requires a Series 2 DVR.

Roku: Roku won’t say how many units it’s sold to date, but if we estimate that 3 percent of Netflix’s 10.3 million subscribers at the end of the first quarter bought the $99 unit, a total of about 300,000 Roku units have been sold.

VUDU: VUDU told me it’s sold “five figures” worth of devices, which I believe is less than 50,000 units.

Apple TV: Published reports put the number of Apple TVs sold at less than 500,000. Notably, of course, Apple has, on multiple occasions, acknowledged that the device hasn’t been nearly as successful as the company had hoped it would be.

Blockbuster Mediapoint Player: The company has never offered up numbers as to how many of these have been sold, nor has anyone really bothered to hazard a guess. Bottom line: Blockbuster has no online video strategy of any kind and while the Mediapoint player was first unveiled some five months ago, when you visit the Blockbuster.com web site, it’s nowhere to be found.

Broadband-enabled TVs: There are more than 50 broadband-enabled TV models due out in 2009, but analysts estimate that only about 3 million total sets will be sold in the next two years combined.

Broadband-enabled Blu-ray Players: To date, 9.6 million Blu-ray players have been sold, but less than 2 million of them don’t include the PS3, according to DEG. While new broadband-enabled players continue to be released into the market, the total number of sales to date has to be less than 50,000.

Even with all these numbers, they don’t truly give us an idea of the growth, as there are a lot of unanswered questions. For starters, Microsoft won’t say how many of the 15.1 million Xbox 360 consoles are connected to a broadband connection. And while Netflix says that a million Xbox LIVE members have downloaded and installed the Netflix app for their Xbox 360, since Netflix offers free 48-hour streaming trials to Xbox 360 owners, we don’t know how many paying Netflix subscribers are using the service today. With Netflix spending about 5 cents to stream every movie to the Xbox 360, clearly content offerings such as this are not yet making any money due to the small number of devices in the market.

While some may suggest that the Wii gaming console is missing from this list, so far the Wii doesn’t really offer up any content. Whether or not set-top boxes should be included in these numbers is debatable. It’s my belief that the cable companies are the ones that should be winning in the market when it comes to delivering Internet-based content to the TV or premium content with all-you-can-eat models. But so far, I don’t see the cable companies doing a very good job at this.

On the surface, some of these numbers look really big. But once you break down how many of these devices are being used via a broadband connection and how many consumers have more than one of these devices in their living room, the actual number of individual consumers content owners are reaching via these devices is still very, very small.

Dan Rayburn is EVP of StreamingMedia.com, has his own blog at BusinessofVideo.com and is a principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

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Posted by Dan Rayburn on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  40 Comments
Tags: #ef09_newteevee, Amazon, Apple TV, Blu-ray, feature, Netflix, ps3, Roku, TIVO, vudu, Xbox 360, YouTube

Googlers probably can’t wait for this week to end. After a rash of problems with search, GMail and Blogger — now YouTube has gone on the fritz (Update: YouTube search is back up and working). What’s got to smart even worse is that the problem is just with YouTube’s search; videos have so far been playing just fine. A YouTube spokesperson contacted NewTeeVee, writing: “We’re aware some users are having trouble searching on YouTube. We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.” As always, the Twitterati are all over the issue, tweeting about the #youtubefail.

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: google, YouTube

Somebody somewhere in the Adobe offices must be getting pretty nervous. Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, an also-ran competitor to Flash, suddenly got a YouTube boost. Liz reports that YouTube will carry live video of March Madness, thanks to its partnership with CBS — and it’s using Silverlight to offer the video. YouTube, being a web monster, is a true king-maker, and the college basketball tournament broadcasts could prove to be a much-needed shot in the arm for Microsoft and its Silverlight technology.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  25 Comments
Tags: Adobe, Flash, Silverlight, YouTube

Hulu celebrates the one-year anniversary of its public launch today, and it’s getting social by adding Facebook and MySpace functionality. Many skeptics (cough Om cough) originally dismissed the joint venture between FOX and NBC as something that couldn’t work, but over the last year Hulu’s premium content service has turned one-time critics into champions, and it’s now the No. 2 video site behind YouTube.

Past might not be prologue for the content provider, however. The online video world is vastly different now than it was when Hulu launched. Hulu may be a victim of its own success, as the premium content era it helped usher in is adopted by the competition. With media companies and cable cos getting into long-form video online, we at NewTeeVee ask the question: Do we need Hulu anymore?

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: Hulu, YouTube

The poor economy dominated the scene at CES this year, and it led highly anxious exhibitors to highlight lower prices for gadgets like netbooks, cell phones, and A/V devices. The jittery economy is pushing consumers to look for value, and aggressive price points are the best way to coax them into spending their limited stash of cash. That said, lower prices don’t mean less interesting features. Almost all the relevant devices unveiled this year offer efficient, web-convergent services.

Take Sony’s new $180 HD camcorder and Kodak’s Flip Mino-killer HD camcorder, the Zx1 — both are being heavily marketed more as YouTube accessories than standalone devices. A study last year revealed that camcorders are vulnerable in this economy because they have only one function (video). As a result, even premium companies like Canon unveiled budget DVD and Flash camcorders at the show.

Netbooks also wouldn’t have been as huge as they are at CES, if they weren’t cheap. “Business netbooks” sounded like an impossible product category a few months ago, but HP and others are seriously pushing consumers towards these simpler PCs. Netbooks reflect the new need for appropriately modest computing power with versatile features, like 3G connections and GPS receivers. According to the Wall Street Journal, 46 percent of businesses are cutting heavy computer upgrades, and the word around Vegas is that netbooks could be the cheaper IT upgrade, with the optimistic idea that their portability will make workers more efficient.

And netbooks also use the web-based convergent principle: If workers can use services like Google Docs or Zoho for office productivity docs, employers don’t have to spend on expensive separate software suites. The fact that the keyboards of these laptops finally offer human-hand-sized proportions and improved batteries also works in their favor.

Wireless streaming speakers, TVs, and set-top boxes are also big this year. Netgear unveiled a $200 player that receives Net content wirelessly, and many are showing simple but full-featured iPod docks for less than $100.

The CES floor is also littered with cheap(er) Blu-ray players. In 2008, I could count on one hand the number of affordable Blu-ray players from big-name companies. In 2009, Sharp is unveiling two sleek Blu-ray players that will be available for less than $300 and come with a cool new “Quick Start” feature that improves disc-loading.

Despite all this, the most telling product trend associated with low prices is that many companies are refusing to give out prices for their higher-end gadgets. Samsung’s new HZ10W camera, Panasonic’s 47-inch wireless TVs, and Sony’s 3-D TV prototypes were not given price estimates. That’s forced consumers, their advocates and analysts to focus on the cheap gadgets. You might see this as a cynical ploy to bait consumers into turning over the little cash stash, but I see it as a good opportunity to invest in a good product if you do your research and make smart decisions.

Jose Fermoso is a staff writer for Wired.com

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Posted by Jose Fermoso on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  14 Comments
Tags: Blu-ray, Canon, CES 2009, economic crisis, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, YouTube

Israel’s strikes into Gaza continue apace, and news stories are pointing out that the conflict is being fought online as well — Twitter, YouTube and hacking web sites are playing a role, as ways to get information out of the country and dispense propaganda. There’s no need to drop pamphlets when you can post video of soldiers destroying a government building on YouTube or send threatening texts. The delivery mechanism is new, but propaganda isn’t.

Neither are the efforts to take out the delivery mechanism and means of communications. However, with Hamas using the same technology as citizens, the scope of such destruction is much wider. On Sunday, Palestinian mobile operator Paltel said that 90 percent of its infrastrucutre in Gaza was down, potentially cutting off communications via cell phone. Warning that the Gaza strip could be “disconnected from the outside world,” Paltel issued a statement that read:

Paltel Group has several alternatives and means that can allow connecting Gaza Strip with the outside world, however only one alternative is still functioning as all other alternatives have been totally damaged as a result of the air strikes and ground assault.

Other reports detail challenges in landline communications and Israeli news sources report that communications among Hamas leaders have pretty much been limited to walkie-talkies. This communication disruption is a scorched earth policy that goes beyond just disrupting the communications of military leaders, and it disadvantages the entire population — civilians included — by cutting them off from the benefits of the information economy. The use of civilian technology and communications by military and terrorists groups makes that infrastructure a bigger target (as was the case in Iraq), much to the detriment of everyone else on that network.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  6 Comments
Tags: Gaza, Israel, Paltel, Twitter, YouTube

Amazing! I have been watching the spat between Google’s YouTube and Warner Music Group play out in the media — both online and in its offline variants. The bottom line of this corporate he said she said is that there are no more music videos that feature Warner artists such as Madonna. And a lot of it is two parties crying over spilt milk.

Warner complains it doesn’t make any money from Google, even though music videos are extremely popular on YouTube and are major drivers of traffic to the site. According to The New York Times, Warner made $639 million in digital revenues for fiscal year 2008, of which less than 1 percent (or less than $6.39 million) came from YouTube. Another Fellow music labels might soon follow Warner’s suit and try and renegotiate with YouTube or opt out all together.First of all, this complaining is high-grade manure. All record labels got a piece of YouTube right before the company was sold to Google in October 2006 — a stake that translated into about $50 million each. That’s $25 million a year for 2-year contracts. If the record labels were smart they would have made much more money — Google shares topped $700-a-share vs. $420 a share at the time Google snapped up YouTube.

I can totally understand why Google is asking Warner to take a walk — they feel like being held up by by local mafioso for more baksheesh and don’t want to play ball. At the same time, the record labels, too, have a legitimate gripe. Google has failed to monetize the professionally produced, highly popular music videos — a much easier sell than kitty videos to brand advertisers.

The bottom line is — Google’s YouTube has the traffic (and the eyeballs) and record labels have the content. The two need each other as much as baseball needs the Yankee dollars. So get on with it, guys — and stop crying over spilt milk.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  18 Comments
Tags: google, Warner Music, YouTube

The 2008 election and online video have had a lot of special moments together: The CNN-YouTube primary debates. Obama Girl. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can.” Saturday Night Live’s “Fey-lin” skits. And even though those examples might lean to the left, online video isn’t just a liberal thing. Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have active YouTube accounts, and in September, the McCain account had nearly three times as many average views per video as its rival’s. And no fewer than nine outlets offered live online video of the presidential debates.

But those were simply viral videos and two-hour events coming straight from the official debate stream. For election night, the fun starts early and could continue all night. There will be red and blue states to call, voter fraud to police, polling lines to record, partisan parties to tune into, and pundits, pundits, pundits. For those who want more detail, perspective or partisanship than TV broadcasts offer — or for the election-obsessive looking to build a multi-platform election night command center — we’ve sniffed out a few of the election night options to choose from. Continue Reading..

Image credit: CNN. This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: YouTube, MySpace, C-SPAN, Cnet, @CNN, ABC.com, Obama, McCain, Election 2008, Current.tv, election night, CBS.com, PBS, Ben & Jerry's, MSNBC, Mememorandum, Terra.com, Talking Points Memo, debates

PPLive, a Singapore Shanghai-based start-up that has a P2P video platform for distributing television in Asia has developed a way to accelerate and distribute Flash videos over peer-to-peer networks. The application called PPVA, sits in your task bar and when it detects a Flash video stream, it tries to find folks using the PPVA network who may have cached the same clip. This is good for solving the problems with very-popular files, since there is a likelihood that many more people would have watched the clip.

While this seems like a good idea, the guys at NewTeeVee who uncovered the story are being cautious, mostly because of the beta nature of PPVA. The other issue with this technology – it could make the video aggregators like YouTube crazy. Why? Because the first few seconds of the video are streamed from say YouTube and rest from the PPVA network. “This becomes an even bigger issue when advertisers start requesting more detailed statistics about online video usage,” NewTeeVee writes. Nevertheless, it could have some interesting implications for P2P CDN offerings.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, Online video, PPLive, PPVA, YouTube

As a business journalist, I have to confess that I love it when money starts changing hands. I can get excited about all sorts of new and upcoming technology, but until people can find ways to create real value and get paid, it’s kind of hard to take seriously, like the 25-year-old married to your 60-year-old boss. So that’s why two startups launching at DEMO caught my eye.

Photrade is a platform on which photographers can post pics and track their use across the web. As part of that tracking, they can set fees for their photos and/or control which sites can use them. If the photo has been taken from the Photrade site, licenses can be revoked and updated at will. There are a few problems with this model, such as convincing people to use it in the first place — both to put quality images on it and pay for said images — but it’s a step in the right direction.

The other is MixMatchMusic, which not only enables online musical collaboration between artists and but payment for such collaborations. The service allows users to record a track of music, input meta data associated with that music and then search for other music that has similar meta data. analyzes it and suggests other music on the site that might compliment it. Musicians can use this to collaborate remotely, or meet musicians whose work they like. They can also create entire songs on the site and list them for download or commercial use. If someone buys the music, musicians get 85 percent of the revenue. Again, the site will have to get both buyers and sellers to particpate.

We hear plenty about all the people willing to work solely for their 15 minutes of fame on the web, and so far most efforts to help people cash in on their 15 minutes have fallen flat, but it’s good to see startups trying hard to address this problem. Maybe users will start taking them up on the solutions.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: DEMO, MixMatchMusic, Photrade, YouTube

Liz Miller says that these days all people are talking about is Michael Phelps, the winningest Olympian, and a former presidential candidate’s lover. Eric Schmidt, director of media and advertising evangelism at Microsoft, tells Beet.tv that nearly 2 million people tuned in to watch the Beijing Olympic Games on NBC’s web site, making it one of the much-watched online events. The interest is peaking elsewhere as special Olympics-oriented sites created by Yahoo, AOL and others are experiencing a big bump. I am not one of those 2 million, and probably won’t be. I am giving the Olympics the pass (not that anyone cares or should care), as a silent personal protest against China and its policies against Tibet.

My silent protest is also against the impotency of the global corporations that kowtow to China in the hope of someday making money off the booming Chinese market, or the world media that seems to be playing along with whatever limitations China seems to have imposed. I am glad to find that there is at least one other person who shares my feelings.

Today, for instance, YouTube took off a video of a protest held outside the Chinese consulate in New York City at the request of International Olympics Committee, because the video shows the five interlocking rings. Is beaming five interlocked rings on the screen a copyright infringement? Is the IOC looking for royalty payments or did the Chinese make them put some pressure on YouTube? Has the IOC become a collection of shylocks, looking for their next pound of flesh and having sold their Olympian ideals in the process? In comparison, somehow the dalliances of former presidential candidates seem less dirty.

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Over the past few weeks, there have been a flurry of announcements from Microsoft, Netflix, TiVo, YouTube, Roku and others detailing how their devices can be used to play movies and other video-based content, delivered via the Internet, on the TV. Industry insiders are speculating that with these announcements the tide is finally turning, that Internet-delivered video will soon make a big impact in the consumer living room.

When looking at any new technology offering, however, market penetration rates are crucial. As we’ve seen in the past, the best technology is not what always wins — all that matters is what consumers adopt. With that in mind, here is a breakout of the numbers for these TV-connected devices and content offerings:

• Xbox 360: 10.5 million units sold in the U.S. (source: NPD)
• Netflix: 8.2 million members (source: Netflix)
• PS3: 4.9 million units sold in the U.S. (source: NPD)
• TiVo Series 3: 250,00 units sold (estimate). While TiVo won’t say how many have been sold, they did say that 750,000 Series 2 and Series 3 units are connected via broadband. Estimate assumes that two-thirds of them were Series 2.
• Apple TV: Roughly 350,000 units sold (estimate). While Apple won’t say exactly how many have been sold, published reports put the figure at less than 400,000, missing Apple’s goal of 1 million units.
• VUDU: 15,000 units sold (estimate). While VUDU won’t confirm a number, they did say that sales are in the “five figures.”
• Netflix Player by Roku: 10,000 units sold (estimate). Roku isn’t saying how many they’ve sold, but realistically speaking, how many could they have sold in just a couple weeks before they ran out?

By adding up the above numbers we’re left with 19.3 million units sold. On paper, that seems like a half-way decent number. But if we break down these numbers even further, the real number of consumers capable of getting these content offerings is much smaller — so small, in fact, that they barely register.

Take for instance the recent Microsoft and Netflix announcement. While neither side will say just how many consumers have both an Xbox Live account and a Netflix account, it’s clearly less than half of Netflix’s 8.2 million members. So if we estimate on the high side and assume that a third of Netflix’s members have an Xbox 360 console and an Xbox Live account, we come up with a mere 2.7 million consumers.

As for the PS3, Sony only launched their online video service late last week, so it’s hard to estimate any numbers. But of the 4.9 million PS3s sold in the U.S. to date, not all of them are online. Estimating that 20 percent of them are not connected via broadband, we’ll use an install number of 4 million consumers.

When it comes to TiVo, you have to estimate how many of the 750,000 broadband-connected TiVo units are Series 3. Estimating that a third of the units are Series 3 would give us 250,000 consumers. But how many consumers have more than one TiVo? I have two Series 3 TiVos in my house, so while I am counted as two units, I’m only one consumer. TiVo won’t say how many customers have more than one unit, but taking that into account, the number of real consumers that TiVo is reaching with the Series 3 is probably more like 200,000.

That leaves us with the Apple TV, the Netflix player by Roku and VUDU. Using the numbers above, I estimate they reach 375,000 consumers combined.

Adding up all of the new numbers gives us just over 7.2 million consumers, far lower than the original 19.3 million hardware units that have been sold. And this 7.2 million number is even more skewed in that it does not take into account unique consumers. How many of the 7.2 million consumers have an Xbox 360 and a TiVo or an Xbox 360 and a PS3? If you estimate that 20 percent of them have multiple devices, you’re left with 5.7 million unique users. That’s a very small number. And then you have to estimate what percentage of those consumers will adopt and use the new services, and over what period of time?

Even if you had 50 percent penetration from day one, which you won’t, that would still be less than 3 million consumers using these devices to get Internet-based video to their TVs. While it is good to see more content options coming to consumers, adding up all of the install numbers for these devices gives a stark picture of just how small the install base really is. The market is still too fragmented, with too many different devices, all limited by a lack of premium content.

In the long run, the cable operators still have the best shot at bringing Internet-based video to the TV. Set-top boxes still have the most penetration with consumers and provide them with multiple ways of getting content. Unless of course you’re like me and only have TiVo, in which case the single-stream cable cards that most cable operators use don’t allow for any of the functionality of cable TV set-top boxes.

Dan Rayburn is EVP of StreamingMedia.com and has his own blog at BusinessOfVideo.com.

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Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere ";

Posted by Dan Rayburn on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  20 Comments
Tags: Microsoft, Netflix, Roku, TIVO, YouTube