Believe it or not, it was only a few years ago that we didn't have hundreds of thousands of hours of online video to watch at any time. The explosive new popularity of sites like YouTube has been made clear by research that shows that there are 45% more people watching online video now than there were a year ago, and those people watch around four and a half hours per month. Since the average video is about three minutes long, that's a lot of videos! All in all, 77% of people with internet access watch online videos.

You probably won't be surprised to read that the leader is Google's YouTube, which reached a whopping 99.5 million people in October &mdash two-thirds of the entire market. Also of note is a new site called Hulu, which is owned by NBC Universal and News Corp (the company that owns the TV network and film studio Fox). Hulu has become the sixth most popular site in a very short period of time. These companies all want to make the world wide web the final frontier of video; you'll have to decide for yourself whether you prefer watching this stuff on your computer or cellphone rather than your TV.

Hulu's purpose is particularly ambitious to that end; you'll likely want to check it out for its full-length television episodes and movies, although it has a number of short clips as well. YouTube, on the other hand, is mostly used for short clips like video blogs and instructional videos such as our own video about how to choose between top phones, TVs, and more using our Comparators. Those sorts of things clearly work on the internet, but not everyone has embraced full-length programming yet.

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