U.S. viewers on average will spend about two more hours per week watching television by 2012, due to growth in video-on-demand selections and the use of digital video recorders. During that same time period, Internet use away from work is estimated to increase by under half an hour per week.

David Sanderson, head of Bain’s global media practice. Said that for Internet video to gain traction against broadcast, cable or satellite signals into viewer’s home could take as long as five years to happen. "There are capacity constraints, the technology isn’t quite there … and frankly the business models for the content owners, all of that still needs to be worked out," Sanderson said at the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

"Until that’s worked out and until the Internet can deliver that same experience, then it’s still going to be delivered over the traditional multichannel video providers," he said.

Sanderson said the Internet will become a more solid outlet for video in the future and that viewers today are mainly using it to watch videos of programs they missed on TV.

"People are spending time watching YouTube videos, but the amount of time they’re spending isalmost negligible relative to the time they’re spending watching professionally generated television," Sanderson said.