Technology Blog

comScore has just released some telling stats about the massive growth of live streaming video over the web. According to the analytics company, over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on the major live video publishers (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. Of course, video consumption on the web has grown generally--U.S. audiences watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. comScore says that even though live stream viewership still represents a fraction of the total time spent watching online video, it does indicate that viewers are increasingly looking for live streams on the web. While live online video sites don't have nearly as much of an audience as static video sites, the live video sites have been able to keep their audiences more engaged for a longer period of time. For example, the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average onli