In just a few short weeks, we’ll all be huddled around our televisions, surrounded by mounds of food, family and friends watching football… unless you’re one of the growing number of people in the United States who doesn’t own a television. Instead, you might be watching the big game live online.

In the past, the Super Bowl has been aired exclusively on television. If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic or in line at the grocery store getting those game day munchies, you know the agony of missing even a moment of the game. This year, you don’t have to. Got a smart phone, tablet or laptop? Then you’ve got the Super Bowl, live, at your fingertips.

NBC will broadcast the Super Bowl on network television and, for the first time, it will also stream the game on its website. Though it remains unclear if all cell providers will have access to the mobile version, Verizon Wireless customers who have downloaded the Verizon NFL app will be able to watch on their mobile devices.

But did NBC skip a major market? The Super Bowl will not be available online outside the United States. I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent a Super Bowl weekend abroad. When I was in Dublin last year I noticed that bars held Super Bowl events that sold out days before the opening coin toss. In fact, the pre-Super Bowl commotion there was bigger than any I’d seen before. And yet, these key international fans won’t be able to take part in the online Super Bowl revolution. Yet.

Let’s consider the true winners of this new development – advertisers. Rumor has it that the online Super Bowl broadcast will include the pricey, sought after ad spots that appear on the network version. Imagine the millions who already view the traditional Super Bowl broadcast multiplied exponentially by the millions who will tune in online. It promises to be quite the year, for both advertising and football.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, bill H.R. 3261), which would increase penalties for trafficking copyright materials, streaming unauthorized videos and selling counterfeit drugs or goods online, will be voted on by the House Judiciary committee when congress resumes after winter break.

Chairman Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), who introduced the bill in October of 2011, said, “This much-needed legislation makes it harder for foreign thieves to steal and sell America’s intellectual property. The Stop Online Piracy Act protects the profits, products and jobs that rightly belong to American innovators.” But the bill has been controversial.

Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager

Is online video a part of your marketing mix and, in particular, your SEO strategy? As online video usage continues to surge, more marketers are focusing on how video can integrate into their search programs. The following YouTube statistics show how prevalent online video has become:

• 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Approximately 120 decades of video are uploaded in a year

What can your company do to make sure that your videos are ranking high in search results and are visible to relevant users? Much like your site content and meta data, you need to make sure that your video title and description are keyword rich (without being spammy) and applicable to what the user is looking for. Think about what terms users that are interested in your video would use to search and work to incorporate them into your copy. You can also provide keyword tags for your video to increase search visibility.

Posted by: Meg Archer, Marketing Coordinator

It’s no surprise that YouTube continues to be the leading online video site in the U.S., but what is surprising is the rate at which users are posting content. Currently, 20 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute! That is equivalent to Hollywood releasing over 86,000 new full-length movies in theaters each week.

Over the past two years the number of videos being uploaded per minute has increased from 6 hours in 2007 to 13 in January of this year and now 20 hours per minute. That’s a 233% increase from 2007 to now. Along with hosting millions of hours of user posted content, YouTube remains number one in most views per month. According to comScore, Google/YouTube streams just under 7 billion videos per month in the U.S. With that amount of online video and user interaction, YouTube really is the thousand pound gorilla in the online video space.

Google, the owner of YouTube, is shown dominating the online video space in this comScore chart from April 2009.

Posted by: Meg Archer, Marketing Coordinator

In a recent ClickZ article called “Eight Ways to Use Video to Boost Your Marketing,” the author gives tips on how to incorporate online video into your marketing plan. Using online video is a great, low cost way to meet your consumer on his level through a medium that is growing in popularity and gaining respect from online marketing gurus.

Here are just a couple of the statistics included in the article:

• Almost 80% of U.S. Internet users watched videos for roughly five hours in December 2008, with an average duration of 3.2 minutes per video, according to comScore.
• 65% of online video views were streamed between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

These stats are important because they provide data supporting how important online video has become to the U.S. Internet user, and really, who doesn’t use the Internet these days? We can also infer that your target audience is watching online videos while at work.