WebProNews

 comScore, a digital media measurement firm has released numbers on the U.S. streaming video market from its Video Metrix service. In January, 123 million people viewed 7.2 billion videos online. This accounted for 70 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience.

The average video streamer watched 59 streams of the period of a month, which are around two videos per day. The average amount of time spent watching videos was 151 minutes for the month and the average amount of time spent viewing a single video was 2.6 minutes.

Google sites were the dominant streaming video properties in January with 54.7 million unique streamers and total video streams of 1.167 billion. The majority of the streaming took place at YouTube, which had 992 million video streams initiated.

comScore also analyzed U.S. video consumption by time of day, which revealed that people were more likely to watch video on the weekdays than on the weekends. The most popular time of day to view video was between 5-8 P.M. on weekdays, increasing video consumption by 60 percent over the average. For the weekends the most video consumption took place between the hours of 7-11 P.M., when streamers 31 percent more video than average.

"Marketers have a great opportunity to leverage Internet video in conjunction with their traditional TV buy and essentially double their 'primetime' commercial airing hours," said Erin Hunter, executive vice president of comScore. "'Primetime' TV viewing occurs between 8:00 and 11:00 P.M., while 'primetime' viewing of online video occurs during the preceding block of time -- between 5:00 and 8:00 P.M. on weekdays. Shrewd marketers will utilize a multi-channel strategy to capitalize on these adjacent 'primetime' blocks in order to maximize their marketing impact."