That data point comes on the heels of an announcement earlier on Thursday that YouTube is now available in IsiZulu and Afrikaans, two languages spoken in South Africa. The site is now available in 51 languages total, with YouTube offering a localized experience including a top-level domain and country-specific video recommendations in 35 countries around the world.

YouTube has previously said that it clocks more than three billion video views every day. This means that at least 1.8 billion of those views come from people whose primary language is not English, no matter whether they reside inside the U.S. or not.

This kind of diversity represents a huge opportunity for YouTube: Premium content services like Netflix and Hulu are subject to contractual restrictions that turn international expansions into a slow-moving process. YouTube, on the other hand, already has a global audience, and it has begun to monetize a significant part of it. A localized version of YouTube’s partner program is now available in 25 countries.

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A user survey conducted by TV Guide has 15 percent of respondents saying they watch more than six hours of online video a week. Last year, that number was still at four percent. Sixty-two percent of all respondents said they watch more online video than just a year ago.

Of course, TV Guide’s user survey is somewhat self-selective, which is why it’s interesting that a study by advertising specialist Burst Media has even more impressive numbers: The Burst Media Online Insights survey (PDF) has the number of people who tune in online for more than six hours a week at close to 30 percent. Almost three percent even profess watching more than 24 hours of online video per week!

TV Guide’s survey, which will be presented at the paidContent Entertainment conference in Los Angeles Thursday, also shows that a lot of that growth can be attributed to professional content. Fifty-five percent of the respondents said they tune in to their favorite shows online. That’s also echoed by the Burst Media survey, albeit with slightly weaker numbers. Burst’s survey has 39.1 percent of Internet users watching TV content online, with 49.7 percent watching user-generated content.

And finally, two-screen activity continues to grow as well. Burst Media says a third of online viewers now “often” use the Internet while watching TV.

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Also interesting is the percentage of users who told researchers that they stopped by such a site yesterday, which grew to 28 percent. In other words, more than a quarter of us go to YouTube and its competitors on any given day.

A few other tidbits worth noting: Parents frequent video sites more than the general public, with 81 percent of parents saying that they use these kinds of sites, but only 61 percent of non-parents admit to it. There’s also some racial difference in how viewers tune into online video: Around 69 percent of the white folks surveyed visit YouTube & Co., compared to 79 percent of all the people of color.

Of course, the popularity of video sharing sites isn’t limited to the U.S.: Earlier today, a report from Allot Communications revealed that close to a quarter of all mobile bandwidth consumed worldwide can be traced back to YouTube.

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The growth is driven in part by a usage shift for people aged 31 to 44, who for the first time, now spend more time online (17 hours) per week than in front of the TV (14 hours). People aged 45 to 54 also embrace the Internet much more than before, now spending 14 hours in front of the web browser as well as the TV.

These trends also have a direct impact on online video. 33 percent of consumers in the U.S. and Canada now stream video online, compared to 16 percent three years ago. However, the lust for video isn’t permeating to non-PC devices just yet: Only eight percent of all mobile consumers watch TV or video on their handset.

Forrester’s data is based on voluntary surveys of individual consumers in the U.S. as well as in Canada, which explains why there are discrepancies when compared to data coming from Nielsen. The latter estimates that U.S. households watch about five hours of TV a day.

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That means U.S. Internet users who frequent video sites now watch an average of 30 minutes of online video a day. As a frame of reference, recent Nielsen data shows U.S. households watch about five hours of TV a day.

Part of the growth in online video has to do with individual sites becoming stickier. One good example for this trend is YouTube, which attracted a total of 146 million viewers in October when combined with the other Google video properties. comScore recorded more than two billion viewing sessions for Google’s video sites that month. Do the math, and you’ll see that the average YouTube viewer now watches videos for some 19.7 minutes before leaving the site.

YouTube is trying to extend the length of these sessions even further by offering its users a more immersive experience. The site recently launched its big screen-optimized Leanback user interface to serve videos as a continuous stream, and YouTube’s Hunter Walk told us at NewTeeVee Live last week that the goal is to encourage “low-intent viewing” by serving a personalized channel of videos as opposed to the thousands of channels on cable TV.

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Mobile traffic to the video site grew 32 percent on post-match mornings. This significantly contributed to a rise in mobile data consumption, which was up 16 percent during that time of the day.

Data consumption was up 24 percent while matches were going on. However, most mobile users didn’t try to watch video of complete games on their handsets, but instead used them to catch up on stats and real-time reports from the games. Web browsing was up 35 percent, but video streaming bandwidth only increased by 11 percent. And YouTube traffic actually dipped 14 percent during matches broadcast after work hours, with people busy following them on the big screen.

Here’s a snapshot of two particular matches that were broadcast during different times of the day (all times are GMT+2):

I know what you’re thinking: Weren’t all the World Cup games during morning, or at least the daytime hours? They were in the U.S., but they don’t call this the World Cup for nothing. Allot based its findings on data from mobile networks around the world, which were analyzed during 42 matches.

For more insight into mobile and PC-based online video consumption during the World Cup, please also check our article World Cup Stats: The Net’s Biggest Sporting Event.

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The shift, however, comes with hefty implications: a huge growth in mobile data traffic and the all-but-certain death of flat-rate mobile broadband pricing, as carriers follow AT&T’s lead in pricing mobile broadband.

This year, for the first time, Pew asked mobile users about emerging Internet activities like sending photos and videos, posting and watching them online. Note these categories for the next usage growth spurt. Today, 54 percent of U.S. cellphone owners have used their mobile device to send someone a photo or video, 20 percent to watch a video, and 15 percent to post a photo or video online.

Those are significant numbers; as a reference, the total portion of U.S. cell phone owners who use Internet, email *or* instant messaging is 40 percent. More report sending photos and videos from their phones than going online. And of course, this is more bad news for Cisco’s Flip, with its soon-to-be-outdated focus on single-function video cameras.

For signs that mobile video consumption is already climbing, look no further than YouTube, which announced today it has crossed 100 million mobile video plays per day. This makes its mobile video volume about the same as its web video volume at the time it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. YouTube’s mobile video views grew 160 percent in 2009. And YouTube has just majorly revved its mobile site for optimized playback and better browsing. There’s no doubt that will only add to usage.

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The game also caused some significant activity on Twitter, with Trendrr tracking about 120,000 tweets per hour for the keyword USA and 90,000 tweets per hour for the keyword Ghana.

That’s a lot of tweets, but not as much as caused by the 91st minute miracle in the game against Slovenia, which caused some 175,000 tweets per hour. The number of tweets also wasn’t high enough to cause any significant problems for Twitter, which saw its service struggle earlier this month under the flood of World Cup-related activity.

Akamai has also seen more traffic before, measuring record-breaking 421,000 hits per second during the game between South Africa and Uruguay last week. Much of this can likely be explained by the fact that users tune in online when they’re at work, but prefer the big screen when they’re at home on the weekend. In fact, Nielsen said today that the U.S. vs. Ghana game drew the biggest U.S. soccer audience ever to TV broadcasts.

And World Cup online traffic hasn’t been down across the board: Univision did see some record traffic this Sunday for its Univisionfutbol.com site, delivering more than 12.4 million page views and up to 72,000 simultaneous streams on Sunday due to the matchup between Argentinia and Mexico.

However, with both the U.S. and Mexico out, one has to wonder if this will be it, in terms of online traffic records for the World Cup, at least for the U.S.-based audience? It’s only natural that tournaments see their audience gradually erode as people’s favorite teams are sent home. CBS shared some statistics about the online audience of March Madness on Demand last week that showed some of the biggest crowds tuning in early on, with numbers gradually declining towards the end.

The World Cup is admittedly somewhat of a different beast, so we will have to wait and see whether other countries will be able to capture the world’s imagination, in which case the coming rounds could deliver even more traffic records.

Picture of U.K. soccer fan courtesy of Flickr user ggjsmith.

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Most of that growth comes from younger users, as 85 percent of males aged 18-24 and two-thirds of all respondents aged 18-34 said they watched online video weekly. As the behavior becomes even more mainstream, Magid estimates that the amount of time viewers spend watching video online will increase by about 5 percent over the next year.

There’s evidence that users are becoming more interested in viewing online video in the same way that they watch TV. About 38 percent of online video viewers say they are interested or very interested in connecting a computer to their TV to watch online video. And while short-form video still rules, whether it be user-generated clips, movie trailers or clips of TV or movie content, about 76 percent of those who watch video online say they are tuning in to professionally produced content regularly.

But online video viewers, for the most part, say their over-the-top video habit is not interfering with their normal TV watching. Only 14 percent of users said they watched less TV due to watching content online. About 72 percent said they watched the same amount of TV despite also watching video online — and another 10 percent said they watched more TV.

One of the big questions about online video is the consumer tolerance of online video ads, particularly as more ad dollars are entering the segment and video publishers seek to monetize their video assets. According to the survey, 48 percent of respondents said they found ads online to be as acceptable as those in TV shows — and 7 percent said online video ads were more acceptable.

Photo courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user tnarik.

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U.S. soccer aficionados can tune in on two different websites to get their fix, both of which feature their own set of advantages and challenges: ESPN3 doesn’t carry all of the games, and the site’s live stream can only be accessed by some 70 percent of all broadband households, but is available with bitrates of up to 1.8 Mbps. Univisionfutbol.com, on the other hand, is free, but lacks a dedicated HD option — plus the commentary is in Spanish. So in the first week of the tournament, which site proved more popular?

So far it looks like ESPN3 has won this one fair and square, no overtime necessary: ESPN3 clocked 5.7 million hours of World Cup video viewing from June 11 to June 18, with close to 3.4 million viewers watching for, on average, more than 90 minutes. The game between the U.S. and Slovenia was seen by 798,911 unique viewers, some of which tuned in after the fact for an on-demand replay. Mobile has also done pretty well for the broadcaster, with ESPN Mobile tracking 1.8 million mobile video views since the tournament started.

Univisionfutbol, on the other hand, tracked a total of 2.5 million hours of video from June 11 to June 17, with more than a quarter million daily unique streams and viewers tuning in for 80 minutes, on average. (Note: Univision did not provide us with data for June 18). Close to 200,000 viewers alone tuned in to see the face-off between Mexico and France.

Of course, the U.S. isn’t the only country with cubicle workers glued to their screen to follow their team. UK-based broadcaster ITV says its online live stream of the World Cup attracted more than a million unique viewers last week. ITV saw a peak of 204,000 simultaneous viewers during the match between the Netherlands and Denmark, according to paidContent:UK. On average, around 130,000 viewers tune in at the same time.

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Consumers were found to have watched, on average, 3 hours and 10 minutes of video per month in the first three months of 2010, down from 3 hours and 22 minutes in the prior quarter. Online video viewing was still up year-over-year, with consumers watching about 10 minutes more video online per month than during the first quarter of 2009.

The sequential decline in video viewing came along with a general decline in the total amount of time people spent on the Internet each month. Consumers on average spent 25 hours and 26 minutes using the Internet on a PC, according to Nielsen, down from 26 hours and 32 minutes in the fourth quarter and 29 hours and 15 minutes a year earlier.

Meanwhile, people watched more TV than ever before. The amount of TV viewing consumers did increased by two hours per month, topping off at 158 hours and 25 minutes, on average. That increase might have come as a result of more HDTVs in U.S. households. Nielsen claims that more than half of all U.S. homes now have an HDTV and an HD pay-TV subscription.

The amount of TV that people watched on a DVR also increased, to 9 hours and 36 minutes, from 8 hours and 22 minutes the year prior. That increase not surprisingly came as a result of more people having DVRs in their homes. Now more than a third of U.S. households have a DVR, according to Nielsen.

While Internet usage declined and TV usage increased, the amount of time consumers spent doing both simultaneously increased. Consumers now spend 3 hours and 41 minutes a month surfing the web while watching TV, up from 3 hours and 21 minutes the year prior. Simultaneous TV watching now makes up a third of all the time that people spend on the Internet.

Picture courtesy of Flickr user Marco Raaphorst.

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The report, entitled “Can You See Me Now?: The New World of Consumer Visual Communications,” forecasts that consumers will make 29.6 billion video calls in 2015, up from just 3.2 billion this year. During that time, most video calls will be made over PCs, but by 2015, the number of video calls made over the computer will level out as consumers take advantage of video chat services available on mobile devices and Internet-connected TVs.

The report forecasts that the number of consumers using mobile video chat services will increase from about 3 million in 2010 to 143 million in 2015. That increase, along with a growing number of minutes per consumer, will push mobile video chat volume from just one percent of all video calls to 29 percent by 2015. As mobile video calling catches on, so too will revenues associated with the service. As a result, the report estimates that mobile video revenues will grow from about $90 million in 2010 to $3.4 billion just five years later.

While consumers will become increasingly interested in video chat enabled through their mobile devices, there are still risks involved that could hamper adoption. Most notably, mobile carriers might not be keen on video chat traffic running over already overloaded 3G networks. As a result, they could limit video calling to WiFi networks only, or begin putting bandwidth caps on mobile broadband services that could make it expensive for consumers to use mobile video chat.

Mobile video chat won’t be the only potential beneficiary of growing consumer adoption of video calling. Services that work on the next generation of Internet-connected TVs should also see tremendous growth over the next five years. The report estimates that the number of Internet-connected TVs shipped will grow from 21 million in 2010 to 182 million by 2015, and video calling will be one of the services that people will be willing to pay for over those devices. As a result, the report estimates that revenue associated with TV-based video chat services will rise from $3.7 million in 2010 to $2.4 billion by 2015.

To view the complete report on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), click here.

According to the latest data, 69 percent of Internet users have used the web to watch or download online video, which equates to about half (52 percent) of all US residents. Since 2007 — the last time the survey was conducted — Pew notes that the growth in online video viewing has been driven primarily by adoption among young Internet users (those aged 18 to 29), 84 percent of which have copped to viewing or downloading videos online. That compares to 74 percent of Internet users aged 30 to 49 that say they’ve watched or downloaded online videos, and just 53 percent of Internet users aged 50 and above.

Online video viewing also is marked by those who are at least somewhat well-off. According to Pew, 78 percent of respondents with annual household income of $75,000 or more viewed or downloaded videos online, compared to 64 percent with income of $50,000 to $74,999 a year, and just 46 percent of respondents who had annual household income of less than $50,000. That could be due at least in part to higher broadband penetration among those who can afford it; according to the survey, 89 percent of online video viewers have broadband video access.

The percentage of users that had at least some college education was also disproportionately higher than those who did not. The Pew survey found that 75 percent of respondents that had graduated college, as well as 75 percent of those with some college education, watched online video. That compares with just 57 percent of Internet users that were high school grads or lower that viewed or downloaded online video.

While identifying the types of consumers most likely viewing online video, the study also identified some shifts in the types of online videos that are being watched now, as opposed to a few years ago. The biggest shift came in the number of viewers who turn to the Internet for comedy or humorous videos, growing from a third to half of all Internet viewers in just two years. In that time, funny videos supplanted news videos, which grew modestly from 37 percent to 43 percent. Also popular were educational videos, which 38 percent of Internet users now watch (compared to 22 percent in 2007), and movies and TV shows, which have jumped from being watched by just 16 percent of Internet users, to 32 percent in two years time.

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Lost fans sent out a total of 437,613 tweets during the series finale, according to new data from Trendrr. Just as a quick frame of reference: Twitter darling Glee got less than 20,000 tweets when its most recent episode aired last week.

Of course, “lost” isn’t exactly the easiest term to track. People lose their keys, get lost on the way to a restaurant, and so on. In fact, there were a total of 643,000 tweets mentioning the word yesterday (note to networks: if you want to utilize social media, learn from Glee and don’t use generic show names). Trendrr excluded all mentions of the word itself except for the time the finale aired, which means that countless “can’t wait 4 Lost finale 2night” tweets didn’t even make it into these stats.

Also noteworthy: The tweets include some early morning participation from Europe, as the UK’s Sky1 aired final episode simultaneously with the U.S. West Coast. Brits got to see the finale today at 5 a.m. local time, according to a report from the Guardian. There were also simulcasts in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Turkey and Canada. From the Guardian story:

“The unprecedented scheduling move aims to prevent illegal Internet downloads of the finale – and save UK fans of the show from having to spend five days dodging web spoilers.”

I know exactly what they’re talking about. I didn’t catch the finale yesterday, and I’ve been on a Twitter diet all day…

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I hate to say it, but Cuban is right, at least in part. Most U.S. consumers still get their TV programming from cable, and the number of people paying for some type of TV service have in fact been increasing as people have been buying HDTVs. 90 percent of us couch potatoes now pay for TV, according to numbers released by Nielsen last week. However, Cuban assumes that this isn’t likely to change anytime soon — and he ignores everything from connected TVs to Netflix. Time for a few quick lessons, Mark.

1. Sports TV is Going Online

Sports has long been a cable TV stable, and Cuban — who owns the Dallas Mavericks — makes fun of YouTube testing the waters of live sports coverage with its recent IPL live stream. His verdict: Those are old ideas that didn’t work 15 years ago, so they won’t work now. Except they do. CBS streamed 11.7 million hours of video with March Madness on Demand, and the network’s video player was accessed by 8.3 million unique visitors throughout the tournament.

I know, that’s still dwarfed by broadcast numbers, but guess how many people watched March Madness via cable VOD? How about zero? CBS used to distribute much of the NCAA’s tournament for catch-up via VOD, but didn’t bother this time around. It just wasn’t worth the effort.

2. Netflix is leading the charge

Cuban essentially argues that consumers don’t want anything but cable VOD. I guess those 14 million Netflix subscribers didn’t get the message. Not only are they voting for cheaper and better ways to get their movies, they’re also increasingly embracing over-the-top video. 55 percent of Netflix’s subscribers used the company’s Watch Instantly service in the first quarter. And no, we’re not just talking about streaming a quick video to your laptop anymore. Netflix is now available through connected TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, the iPad… and many more devices. In fact, the company aims to be on 100 devices before the end of the year.

3. It’s not about set-top boxes

A big part of Cuban’s rant is spent on making fun of people connecting their PCs to their TVs. Cuban is right, that’s not what the average consumer wants to do (even though I’m sure many of our readers have more luck with it than Cuban). Even dedicated set-top boxes for online video can be a hassle. However, millions of consumers already have connected their TVs, oftentimes without even realizing, since Blu-ray players offer a gateway to the Internet. Many of them stream Netflix now, and that could be expanded in the future.

Then there are game consoles. There are more gaming devices in American households than DVRs, and the majority of them are already hooked up to the Internet. Netflix streams video to all major game consoles, and Sony as well as Microsoft have increasingly embraced live sports and exclusive programming. In fact, Microsoft is reportedly in talks for an Xbox-only TV channel.

4. The Future of TV is Connected

By the way, who said that you’ll need a second device at all to connect your TV to the net? An increasing number of TV sets are Internet-ready out of the box, and those devices are becoming more and more powerful. Sony, for instance, is expected to announce a TV set powered by a TV-specific flavor of Google’s Android operating system later this month.

5. Cord cutting is real

Yeah, I know. I just said that more people are subscribing to paid TV services than ever, so how can cord cutting possibly be anything but a fad thought up by online video enthusiasts? Well, how about this: The Yankee Group estimated a few days ago that one in eight U.S. households are going to pull the plug or scale back on cable or satellite TV.

Those findings are not entirely isolated: Less than 22 percent of U.S. consumers think that their cable TV subscription is worth what they pay for it, and loyalty is generally very low: Two thirds would switch if someone offered them a better deal. Even more remarkable — those very consumers that love cable VOD as much as Cuban apparently does are also the ones that are most likely to cut the cord. Consumers thinking about leaving their cable company watched more than four times as many movies via VOD than households faithful to cable. In other words: The trendsetters and heady spenders are ready to leave, and they’re getting more and more options to do so.

Photo courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user Keith Allison.

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Gender issues aside, about 7 percent of all Germans admit to using file sharing networks to download content, which comes to a total of about 4.5 million teutonic downloaders. Teenagers download just slightly more than the average user, with 9 percent stating that they’re downloaders. Also remarkable: 7 percent of users aged 40 to 49 are active users of P2P networks. All of that sharing happens despite many users being fairly certain that at least part of their behavior is violating copyright laws.

87 percent of all consumers questioned stated that it’s likely illegal to share files through social networks, and 94 percent believe it to be illegal to offer files for download via BitTorrent. GfK registered similarly high percentages for the perceived illegality of offering files for download via blogs, newsgroups, one-click host sites and other types of file sharing services. Of course, that doesn’t mean that simply accessing a file shared through a one-click host carries the same type of stigma.

One should also note that there is likely to be a high number of users afraid to state that they’re sharing, even if asked by a market research company. Not only are Germany’s major labels still pursuing lawsuits against file sharers, unlike their counterparts in the U.S., but individual rights holders have been partnering with a number of companies that specialize in hunting down file sharers for profit, resulting in an avalanche of lawsuits that has by now reached the hundreds of thousands. However, all of these lawsuits haven’t helped to turn around the fate of Germany’s entertainment industry, with music sales declining 3.3 percent last year.

These losses are actually now impacting anti-piracy market research as well. Germany’s music industry used to release its annual “Brennerstudie” (burner report) for free. This year, it only made the above mentioned demographic numbers publicly available, and instead decided to sell the full report for €150 (about $200).

Picture courtesy of Flickr user Alaskan Dude.

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