Online Video Audience Surpasses Cable TV

Tubearoo asserts that there are twice as many online video viewers as basic cable subscribers.

Passing people huddled around YouTube on laptops, work computers, and library terminals, perhaps you’ve noticed that online video has become quite popular. Very, very popular. Twice-as-many-viewers-as-cable-television popular. That’s the conclusion the online video Web site Tubearoo reached in a press release on Thursday, using some recent statistics and simple math.

The breakdown is pretty simple. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association reported 65.6 million basic cable subscribers in December 2006. A little more than a year later, comScore video Metrix reported that 123 million people downloaded streaming video in January 2007.

While it does seem to confirm suspicions of an online video explosion, a little skepticism about the source of these numbers seems warranted. The number of cable subscribers seems easy enough to track, but how is comScore measuring the surfing habits of 123 million people? According to the company’s Web site, the data comes from a panel of 2 million people who voluntarily install tracking software on their computers. They then treat these people as a cross-section of the Internet population as a whole, and extrapolate their results.

Even granting that these techniques might not be perfectly reliable, it seems like the significant gap between cable and Internet video is undisputable. Whether you believe advertisers can actually sell anything between videos of people getting hurt on trampolines is another story.