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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