Looks like the sleeping online video giant that is Facebook may finally have awoken. According to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers, Facebook jumped to No. 3 behind established video powerhouses YouTube and Hulu in terms of total streams. That’s up from No. 10 just last month. Facebook generated more than 217 million streams in October to more than 31.5 million unique viewers, up from 110 million streams to 23 million viewers in September.

Source: Nielsen VideoCensus
Note: Includes progressive downloads and excludes video advertising

Facebook actually had more than double the number of unique viewers than Hulu had for October, though this isn’t too shocking given the nature of short, personal video sharing that goes on on Facebook versus the longer-form viewing that happens on Hulu. But the social network’s ascendancy should have the Hulu folks on alert. Facebook already got the early premiere of the NBC (and Hulu owner) show Community earlier this year, and Zuckerberg and Co. could flex their newfound video muscles to snatch even more premium content from the Hulu-gurus.

Overall, the number of total U.S. video watchers dipped slightly to 138.6 million unique viewers from 139.3 million in Sept., but the number of total streams was up to 11.2 billion in Oct. vs. 11.02 billion in Sept. The number of streams per person was up to 81 in Oct. vs. 79.1 in Sept., and the time spent per viewer was up to 212.5 minutes vs. 195.2 in Sept.

Source: Nielsen VideoCensus
Note: Includes progressive downloads and excludes video advertising

Newspapers and magazines may not be faring so well in this economic climate, but consumers are holding onto their entertainment subscriptions, according to a new survey from The NPD Group. The research firm says that monthly per-capita entertainment-content subscription spending rose to $115, which is up roughly 7 percent since last year.

As of August 2009, 81 percent of U.S. households subscribe to a TV service (cable, satellite, etc.), NPD found. The company also discovered that 14 percent of consumers subscribed to a home video subscription service like Netflix, up two percentage points from last year. Additionally,  the increased smartphone adoption has bumped up the number of mobile data subscribers to 9 percent of U.S. consumers, up from 6 percent last year, NPD said.

Read more of this story

While YouTube’s U.S. market share of online video views is 60 percent, according to Nielsen, the site is even more dominant when it comes to video embedding. Internationally, YouTube accounts for 81.9 percent of videos mentioned in blog posts using a link or an embed code (keep in mind that’s the number of videos, not the number of views), according to new research from Sysomos, a social media analytics firm (report found via ReadWriteWeb).

After YouTube, Vimeo accounts for 8.8 percent of embeds, Dailymotion for 4 percent, and MySpace for 1 percent. While the Sysomos study made an admirable attempt to be global, measuring more than 100 million blog posts from around the world, it only includes the major U.S. video streaming brands: YouTube, Blip.tv, Dailymotion, Metacafe, MTV, Vimeo, Hulu, Yahoo Video, Google Video, Break.com, MySpace and MSN Video. To be fair, those sites are popular internationally (and Dailymotion is from France), but that leaves out many countries’ popular local sites, and it also includes destinations like Hulu that geo-block their content so it’s not watchable internationally. It’s impressive to see Vimeo so high up on the list, especially in the U.S., where it accounts for 10.6 percent of blogger embeds.

Sysomos found that the most popular embedded video of the summer was the JK Wedding Dance, followed by the Evian Roller Babies commercial and a crowd-sourced music video by Japanese band Sour.

We may be veering off too far into sports territory here, but the World Series is a video event, so we’ll go ahead and post the news that not only are the New York Yankees up 3 – 1 over Philly, A-Rod and Co. are also being out-Tweeted over the Phillies. According to Trendrr, the Yankees dominated the social media buzz last week, averaging roughly 35,000 Twitter posts a day, and the Phillies have averaged just 20,000. New York peaked early in the week with more than 76,000 Tweets about the team (how many of them were from @om?).

Elsewhere, even when the program is on a two-week break, Glee still bests other TV shows in terms of Tweets. Gleeks haven’t had much to Twitter about so the total number of posts dropped to just 14,313 last week from a high of nearly 57,000 two weeks ago. Dexter still has a grip on the list with more than 6,500 Tweets at its bloody peak, and an appearance by American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert pushed Oprah into fifth place.

Though the summer season did little to slow web video down, the last four weeks of fall TV helped drive September viewing to new highs, with nearly 26 billion videos delivered to more than 168 million U.S. users, another all-time record, according to comScore. Hulu  jumped back to second place behind Google/YouTube with 583 million views after sliding to the fourth place last month. Of course, YouTube obliterated everyone else’s numbers, with 10.3 billion measured video views. And Hulu watchers are real content junkies, each seeing an average of 15.1 videos lasting a total of 1 hour and 32 minutes.

TV networks did especially well on the Top 10 chart for most unique viewers. Fox Interactive, CBS, Viacom, Hulu, NBC and Turner all made the list.

Read more of this story

Yesterday’s official live stream from the red carpet of the premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It, powered by Ustream and hosted by Sony’s Crackle, Facebook and the movie web site, drew 1.8 million total viewers and more than 155,000 peak simultaneous viewers, according to a representative for Ustream. Unlike far too many online video events, this one was international; feeds were distributed globally in six different languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian and Japanese.

When I took a screenshot on Ustream yesterday at 4:53 p.m., the content was hardly thrilling — pictured is a would-be back-up dancer for the canceled tour depicted in the film — but there were more than 130,000 viewers tuned in.

Ustream’s most-streamed event of all time was Michael Jackson’s memorial service in July, for which the site hosted 4.6 million streams and 1.6 million uniques.

Also due today, according to a spokesperson for YouTube, are stats from U2’s live-streamed show on Sunday night.

Because the Gleeks have basically taken over Twitter with their musical Tweets, crushing the competition on the Most Twittered TV Shows list, the good folks at Trendrr decided mix things up this week. With Glee’s dominance out of the picture the remaining graph looks more interesting.

Dollhouse scored nicely with roughly 8,500 Twitter posts on Friday. That was probably because of all the Whedonistas crying about the fact that the show is going on hiatus in November. Dexter slashed his way onto the list with more than 5,200 tweets.

Of course we didn’t just ignore Glee, we just gave the show its own graph on account it being so darn popular. The show continues to grow, peaking at nearly 57,000 tweets last Thursday.

NOTE: The weekly top five most twittered shows is put together from an analysis of tweets matching the exact names of 63 television programs. Trendrr looks at the source data to check that at least 95% of the tweets are related to the show. For more metrics surrounding your favorite show, go to www.trendrr.com and put the name of the show into the search tab.

Streaming video and audio from the likes of YouTube and Hulu now account for roughly 27 percent of global Internet traffic, according to a new study from network management company Sandvine (hat tip to Multichannel News), which surveyed the top 20 ISPs worldwide. This stat is up from 13 percent in 2008.

The window for peak Internet usage, when most everyone is using their connection at the same time, condensed to 7 – 10 p.m. this year, a more primetime version of last year’s 6 – 11 p.m. peak period.

Read more of this story