U.K. Online Video Viewing Audience Grows to Nearly 30 Million Viewers

BBC Sites Lead Traditional TV Broadcaster Market with 55 Million Videos Viewed

LONDON, U.K. — comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released January 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, indicating that the total U.K. online video viewing audience has grown 10 percent during the past year to 29.6 million unique viewers age 15 and older.

Google is U.K.’s Most Popular Online Video Property

Google Sites once again ranked as the top online video property in the U.K. with 23.7 million viewers (up 14 percent versus year ago), driven by the popularity of YouTube.com, which accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed on the property. BBC Sites ranked second with 6.8 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites (4.3 million viewers), Facebook.com (3.6 million viewers), and Yahoo! Sites (3 million viewers).

BBC Has Strong Lead in Online Video Viewing among Big 5 Broadcasters

A total of 4 billion videos were viewed online in the U.K. in January 2009, of which 99.5 million (2.5 percent) were watched on the Web sites of the top 5 television broadcasters: the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, and Sky. The majority of these videos were viewed on BBC Sites, which captured a 54.7 percent market share among the Big 5, followed by Channel 4 (23.8 percent share), ITV Sites (13.6 percent share), Sky Sites (6.8 percent share) and Five.tv (1.1 percent share).

Other notable findings from January 2009 include:

• 80.1 percent of the total U.K. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The total U.K. online video viewing audience watched a combined 280 million hours of video content.
• 23.5 million viewers watched over 2 billion videos on YouTube.com (86 videos per viewer).
• 1.1 million U.K. mobile phone subscribers visited YouTube.com.
• 4.8 million U.K. mobile phone subscribers used their phone to watch any kind of TV or video.

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