YouTube has almost become a synonym for online video in recent years, but professional online video platforms like Hulu.com are dominating YouTube’s dancing babies, according to a new Cisco study. The company just announced the results of its Visual Networking Index Survey (PDF), which compared TV and online viewing habits in the U.S., China, Germany and Sweden. The survey finds that U.S. Internet users spend 2.5 times longer watching professional content as user-generated video clips on their PCs.

Video viewing devices used by U.S. Internet users. Chart courtesy of Cisco.

These results should be music to the ears of Hulu’s management, but the survey also shows that content owners have to play catchup when it comes to licensing their catalogs for overseas audiences. Germans spend twice as much time on their PCs and laptops viewing user-generated videos as opposed to professional content, most likely because there just is no Hulu.de yet. However, Cisco and other devices makers still have some work left to do, as well:  Many Internet users around the world don’t seem to be too excited about the prospect of online video on their TVs.

The Cisco study is based on a survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, which surveyed about 1,000 users in each of the four countries. The study isn’t too specific when it comes to the distinction between user-generated and professional content, but a Cisco spokesperson told us that “professional” encompasses studio-produced shows and movies, as distinct from consumer-produced videos.

This is the first time Annenberg and Cisco have done this survey, but it’s probably safe to assume that user-generated content would have been far more prominent in the years before Hulu. Also, professional content may be taking up more of the users’ time may simply because TV shows and movies tend to be much longer than your average YouTube video.

The study also covers the devices used to watch video and television programming, which again showed significant differences between the U.S. and the rest of the world. 42 percent of U.S. respondents own a DVR, whereas only 11 percent of all Germans surveyed time-shift TV watching in their living room.

The U.S. is also a front-runner when it comes to mobile video. About 23 percent declared that they watch video on their mobile phones, while only 8-12 percent do so in Sweden, China and Germany. Watching videos on iPods and other non-phone devices is also most popular in the U.S., but at 8 percent, far less prominent than one might think.

So, overall, where is online video most popular? No, it’s not the U.S., despite Hulu. It’s China. Chinese Internet users spend almost two hours per day watching video on their PCs, compared with 1.8 hours per day in front of their TVs.  U.S. (and German) users watch 1.5 hours of online video per day — far less than the 3.8 hours of traditional TV time U.S. respondents enjoy daily. This makes Chinese Internet users the only ones that actually watch more video on their PCs that on the TV — and they don’t seem to be bothered about this at all.

“When asked if they would be interested in watching video found on the Internet on their television set, most seemed apathetic, or perhaps they did not understand the question,”‘ the report notes somewhat condescendingly. Perhaps they just didn’t understand why anyone would ask them such a silly question.

Americans, on the other hand, love their big, flat-screen TVs. However, the interest in getting online content on that screen seemed somewhat muted, even stateside. The majority of users where up for the idea, the report notes without providing specific details, but “relatively large numbers (…) neither agreed or disagreed, suggesting that maybe they are unaware of the possibility.” I guess all those companies presenting new, Internet-enabled set-top-boxes at CES these days still have some convincing to do.

Each day we hear about another white-label video service — those friendly people who power video for your site. White-label is the new black; it’s a hugely popular second- or third- or sixth-try business model from people looking to avoid their VCs’ wrath when their YouTube clone hits a wall. Some people say YouTube’s even going to announce one of these Plan B’s next week.

We’ve written about a lot of these enterprise video players, but we know there are more out there. We want to map out the emerging sector and the relative strengths of the participants. Help us out — tell us who you like and why. If you want to pimp your own thing, that’s fine, please just disclose the relationship.

RuTube, the Russian clone of YouTube, is close to inking a deal to be sold to media giant Gazprom-Media for $15 million, according to Kommersant (via the Quintura blog and with thanks to Google Translate).

RuTube, run by a company called ZAO Rutyub, reportedly has a monthly audience of 5.5 million. Embedded above it the current lead video on the site. Though I count more than a few Russians among my ancestors, I have no clue what it’s about.

According to Kommersant’s sources, the deal is nearly done, and includes a pledge to invest several million dollars in the site. But there is reportedly concern that if RuTube is bought by Gazprom, other Russian media companies will stop uploading their content to the site. RuTube’s competitors include Yandex, Mail.ru and YouTube.

Kommersant’s take is that the deal is overvalued. RuTube and Gazprom were reported to have been in talks at a valuation of $20 million in January. Kommersant says venture fund ABRT offered $5 million for RuTube in the summer of 2007.

Skyrider, a commercial peer-to-peer startup, has taken a bridge round of financing and undergone an executive shakeup. CEO Ed Kozel has given up his role to co-founder Ori Cohen, and COO Katie Mitic (formerly VP of marketing) has left the company.

Mountain View-based Skyrider has raised about $5 million in a bridge round with the participation of all its existing investors: Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Velocity Interactive Group (formerly ComVentures). Our interest was piqued when VentureBeat recently reported this round, but didn’t offer a thorough explanation as to what had happened with the company.

Kozel, who’s also a Yahoo board member, is said by multiple sources to have stepped back from the CEO role for personal reasons. He remains chairman of the Skyrider board. Mitic, who at some point last year was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins, is said to be taking on a CEO role at another startup. Skyrider now lists Anthony Bartolo, formerly of Symbol Technologies and Nortel, as COO.

Skyrider has had trouble matching a market with its technology — a recurring trend with P2P, from BitTorrent to the recently shuttered AllPeers. It first tried anti-piracy, then moved to ad-supported peer-to-peer, but to date has been unable to secure a major market presence.

We spoke with Cohen last week, who maintained that everything is fine. “We think the value of the company is about to increase significantly,” he said. Skyrider has a P2P-facing product on the market, he said, but nothing matching it on the web, so it has little visibility. A web version is due in June or July, Cohen said. We assume this would be something along the lines of legal content sampling and distribution like IMEEM, but he would not specify.

Our digging also turned up speculation that both a media company and a telecom company had looked seriously into buying Skyrider, but Cohen said he is not entertaining acquisition offers. Without a big product, the company would be hard-pressed to get a favorable valuation. Skyrider, which we first profiled in August 2006, had previously raised $20 million over three rounds. Cohen said the company has 33 employees, including a research and development team in Israel, and a significant amount of intellectual property.

Millions of dollars keep getting deposited into the bank accounts of video startups. Today didn’t bring any huge deals, but there were a few worth noting:

Dragonfly, a video platform company focused on high-definition, has raised $3 million in funding from angels including former football star Joe Theismann. CEO Guy Nouri’s bio says he sold a previous effort called VideoSite to GTECH back in the ’90s. Customers include Adweek. I have to say, the corporate site is way too bulky and flashy for my taste.

Magnify.net raised not a whole lot from a whole lot of investors: $1 million from Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, Rose Tech Ventures, Active Angel Investors, Chris Anderson, Ogden Capital and Gideon Gartner. It had raised $1.2 million about a year ago. Magnify helps users curate other peoples’ videos. We spoke to WeShow yesterday, and they’re expanding in this direction, too. That company is also currently trying to raise $6 million.

Crunchyroll, an anime and manga video aggregator, raised $4.05 million in Series A funding led by David Siminoff at Venrock, according to peHUB. Deep Jive Interests and others complain that the site was built on copyrighted content. Last week the company took down the advertising from its site and asked users for donations. The company is founded and funded by former HotorNot employees.

Over on the fund side, NBC Universal quadrupled its Peacock Equity fund, taking it to $1 billion from $250 million. Jessica Schell, VP of digital media strategy and investments at NBC U, said at the Harvard conference I attended yesterday that her group “just got the go-ahead to increase to a billion [dollars], and will be doing more larger investments.”

Also, peHUB reports that a Silicon Valley venture firm is teaming with talent agency William Morris “for a new seed-stage digital media/entertainment fund,” but doesn’t name names. So it seems the funding isn’t drying up any time soon.

Crackle let go of eight of its 60 employees today after “making some changes across the board,” according to Jonathan Shambroom, the video site’s general manager, who wanted to make sure we knew that the company is still growing its revenue, content library, and even its staff.

The layoffs were not from any specific department, and Shambroom said the order to make the changes did not come from Sony (Crackle’s parent company). The timing of the layoffs was not tied to any particular event, either. “There was nothing magical about today,” said Shambroom. When asked if other layoffs are in the works, Shambroom said “Absolutely not.”

Despite laying off 13 percent of its staff, Shambroom insisted that by all accounts, the company is strong. He said that the WGA strike helped deliver its biggest audience yet, a claim backed up by a quick look at stats on Compete.

Shambroom also said that the site is signing bigger advertisers as a result of its switch from UGC to editorially-curated content, and while he wouldn’t get specific, he said Crackle has enjoyed month-over-month revenue growth.

Of course, Shambroom was doing what any good company spokesperson does by putting a positive spin on recent events. But a look at the traffic numbers for some of its shows paints a different picture. Of the “Top Shows on Crackle,” only Mr. Deity and The Sands of Passion surpass 100,000 views with any regularity, if at all. The rest remain if the tens of thousands of plays, or just hundreds of plays, even though they’ve been up for months.

Update: After this post went up, I got a note from Crackle’s PR team saying that they couldn’t give me comScore numbers because they don’t take into consideration Crackle’s syndication network. They did provide the following data from Accustream’s User Generated Video 2005 – 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream report:

Crackle.com was the market leader in generating views per video at 216,596, accomplished by emphasizing professional content

Update 2 (Thursday): Turns out there was more to the Crackle layoff story we reported yesterday. Jonathan Shambroom is now heading up the company and was promoted to senior vice president and general manager.

Former co-presidents and Grouper (which became Crackle) co-founders Josh Felser and Dave Samuel are out, though the duo have not officially left the company. According to a Crackle spokesperson, Felser and Samuel will continue to “provide overall strategic guidance in an advisory capacity.” You don’t need a corporate-speak translator to decode that one. Felser and Samuel are still employees of Crackle but their new titles were not provided. Crackle would not comment on the impact of litigation (it was sued by UMG in 2006 after being bought).

During a conversation with Shambroom yesterday, he kept emphasizing that this was all part of a natural progression as the company grows, which rings a little hollow when you lay off 13 percent of your staff and change leadership.

The two no-fuss ways to monetize your web site are to add Google AdSense, which gives you a share of price-per-click, or Amazon affiliate ads, which give you a share of products bought through your links. Until just recently, there were no parallel options for monetizing video. But last week, Google added AdSense overlays for video, and now, as supersleuth Dave Zatz has discovered, Amazon is offering affiliate overlay ads for video.

Amazon now allows members to upload videos and pick products to insert as overlays on top of them through something it’s calling the “Your Video Widget.” Users can upload videos of up to 10 minutes in length, and place as many product ads as they like as long as they appear at least 10 seconds apart. Anyone can embed a video, but only the person who uploads it gets the affiliate share.

We’ve written about lots of video overlay startups, most recently Overlay.tv. Click on the thumbnails below to see Zatz’s screenshots of the upload and ad-insertion process.