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

It’s pretty clear at this point that the secret to success on the Internet is Twilight. Check out the numbers from yesterday’s live web cast from the red carpet of the premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, exclusively hosted by MySpace and powered by Ustream.

The Twilight Saga New Moon Red Carpet Premiere

New Moon Premiere | MySpace Video

The two companies report that they had nearly 3 million total views, to a very nice ratio of 2 million uniques, the latter of which is a new all-time record for a Ustream event. And the Twilight kids easily topped out Ustream’s last big red carpet for the premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which had 1.8 million total views.

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.

Subscriptions have been a hot topic this year as networks and studios look for additional means to monetize their content. TV Everywhere plans from multi-service operators will require a subscription to access premium video online; there’s talk of Hulu moving some of its content behind a subscription wall; and Disney is supposedly working on its own subscription service.

Based on these NPD numbers, the good news for those companies is that consumers are still valuing the entertainment they’re getting from their subscriptions. But the less-than-good news is that there are only so many entertainment subscriptions one house needs or can afford. Content companies shouldn’t go overboard and each offer their own subscription service — they’ll need to consolidate to deliver the best value to consumers.

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.

The other big jump for the month was percentage of U.S. Internet users watching online video; we’re now at 84.4 percent, up from 81.6 percent last month. And the duration of an average video held steady at 3.8 minutes, with the average viewer watching 9.8 hours of video throughout the month (but that’s not entirely lost productivity; remember, you can fold laundry while watching online video!).

The top video ad network by both potential and actual delivered reach was Tremor Media.

Meanwhile, back in the world of traditional distribution, fall season broadcast network ratings are not exactly looking pretty. Fox and CBS are up 5 percent and 4 percent, respectively, while everyone else is down (see the chart from TVByTheNumbers).

U2’s live concert on YouTube this past weekend generated nearly 10 million streams, according to a company spokesperson, making it the biggest streaming event ever for the video-sharing site. Though, to be fair, YouTube hasn’t done that many live events, and hasn’t released stats from them in the past.

We don’t know how many unique people watched the 2.5-hour show, or how many concurrent viewers checked out Bono & Co. We do know that Akamai, which helped deliver the event, only ever displayed a max of about 100,000 concurrent live streams in its public real-time stats over the course of the event. But 10 million is 10 million, and that’s a pretty good number for YouTube to leverage for future marquis streams. Plus, the audience size was certainly hampered by the fact that the music didn’t even start until 9 p.m. PT. (For a reference, Michael Jackson’s memorial service drew 8.9 million streams on CNN, 3 million on MSNBC, 6 million on ABC News, and many more elsewhere.)

YouTube was able to scope out unusually wide rights to the concert, and displayed it in 16 countries across all seven continents. It was also able to post the full show for on-demand viewing directly after it aired, and has gotten nearly 1.2 million views for it so far. A promo video for the concert has also gotten 4.5 million views.

However, those video views have been minimally monetized so far; the live concert had no ads, and the 2-hour and 21-minute on-demand version shows just a single ad (for me, a click to buy the album No Line on the Horizon on iTunes).

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.

While the overall video numbers are up, Sandvine reports that P2P usage is down to 20 percent of total Internet traffic, from 32 percent in 2008. Sandvine said that the amount of P2P usage is growing on an absolute basis, but VOD applications are growing faster. Sandvine looked at the bits per second, per protocol, along with how many active hosts per protocol on the network.

This dip in P2P echoes other recent reports from Cisco and Arbor Networks that show use of peer-to-peer file-sharing as a percentage of broadband usage is on the decline. In June of last year, Sandvine said that P2P traffic was hogging up bandwidth, generating 43.5 percent of Internet traffic, but that study was just of several, unnamed “leading” service providers, which could explain the discrepancy from the 32 percent number released today.

P2P may be seeing its dominance lessen, but as Janko wrote the other week, “[T]hat doesn’t exactly mean that P2P is dead. It’s just not growing as fast as web-based video streaming, which has been largely responsible for a huge overall growth of net traffic. In other words: A smaller piece of a much larger pie can still be a whole lot of pie.”

Cisco, which has predicted that video will drive incredible traffic growth for the web ahead, released data today based on information from 20 of the world’s ISPs that shows video usage hasn’t yet become the driver of broadband growth. The equipment maker said that worldwide, a broadband-connected household consumed 11.4 GB of data per month with 4.3 GB of that being video, social networking or collaboration. the content included in the 4.3 GB doesn’t include P2P video, although Cisco noted that P2P traffic as a percent of broadband traffic is on the decline.

Cisco did not break out the video data specifically, but said that for each connection each day, this amount is roughly the equivalent of approximately 20.5 short- form Internet videos or approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, whether streamed on its own, embedded in a Web page, or viewed as part of video communications. For more, see the story at GigaOM.

Fox Creates Fox Digital Studios; rebranded Fox Atomic unit will create new and derivative content for digital platforms (it already has an original online development studio called 15 Gigs). (release)

Home Entertainment Spending Down 3.2 Percent in Q3; consumer spending on DVD, Blu-ray, digital distribution and pay TV fell to $4billion, but did outperform other consumer good categories. (Video Business)

HD Cloud Launches HD Accelerate; service claims it can transcode a two-hour movie in separate video formats in less than 10 minutes. (emailed release)

YouTube Launches Real-Time Comment Search; video site testing out feature to find what people are talking about. (YouTube Blog)

Pro Beach Volleyball to Use Silverlight; AVP signs a two year agreement with Microsoft to have Silverlight power live HD streaming. (AVP.com)

DVD and VOD Release Dates Getting Closer; average window between the two has fallen to 21 days and some studios are finding VOD does not cannibalize DVD sales. (Variety)

CNBC Releases iPhone App; offers stock quotes and clips, but no live video. (Business Insider)

Glee is becoming the 800 lb. singing gorilla of Twittered television. The high school musical show reached a peak of more than 53,000 Tweets last week, blowing past its prior showing of roughly 40,000. And once again, Glee left the competition in the dust. Heroes had 11,607 Tweets, and Gossip Girl grabbed 10,873. Close on the heels of those teen prep heels was Oprah, who got a nice bump from Mike Tyson’s tear-filled appearance, which pulled in 10,739 Twitter posts.

If we haven’t reached it yet, the Glee backlash is bound to happen soon. Though even as tired as I am of both reading and writing about the show, even this old grumpy gus had to admit that Glee’s Halo/Walking on Sunshine mashup was pretty infectious. Infectious like Glee’s grip on Trendrr’s list of the Most Twittered TV Shows, where it bounced back after a mellow week to rake in a peak of more than 40,000 tweets at its peak last Thursday.

Also on the list, it seems fitting that David Letterman and Gossip Girl should follow similar Tweet patterns given the scandal Letterman is currently embroiled in.

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.

After a hot streak all summer long, online video stats are a bit more of a mixed bag for September, according to Nielsen. Though Nielsen’s measure of the number of unique U.S. viewers was up slightly to 139 million, the number of total streams dropped 3 percent to 11.02 billion.

While streams per viewer and time spent per viewer were both up year-over-year, they were down from August.

Facebook, which has been in comScore’s top 10 rankings in terms of unique viewers, cracked Nielsen’s list with 110 million streams to 23.1 million unique viewers. While Facebook rose, YouTube hit a rough patch. The video giant dropped both in total streams in Sept. to 6.8 billion (vs. 7.18 billion in Aug.) and 106 million unique viewers (vs. 107 million in Aug.). The new fall season buoyed Hulu, which saw nice gains on both fronts. During Sept., Hulu served up 437 million streams (vs. 392 in Aug.) to 13.5 million viewers (vs. 9.8 million in Aug.).

Nielsen and comScore often disagree on video viewing trends; we’ll have to see if these shake-ups are echoed by comScore when its numbers come out later this month.

Consumer Spending on Rentals Increases in Q3; DVD and Blu-ray rentals up 9.9 percent year-over-year, hitting $1.6 billion for the quarter. (Video Business)

New Tech Disrupts Camcorder Pirates; near-infrared LEDs behind movie screens put green and red blotches on surreptitious footage. (Variety)

Project Runway Heading for the Wii; players will create and “sew” their fashions and even strut the catwalk. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Barry Sonnenfeld Vlogs; director of Men in Black will talk about his geek passions on Crackle. (AllThingsD)

50 TV Insiders to Follow on Twitter; Ryan Seacrest, Seth Meyers, and Tracy Morgan among those recommended. (The Wrap)

EveryZing Signs FOXNews.com and FOXBusiness.com; company will provide search and SEO for both sites. (VideoNuze)