While oldteevee remains the top video-watching dog for most people, the PC is gaining ground, according to a recent study by Ipsos MediaCT. Ipsos found that, among U.S. video downloaders and streamers, the amount of video consumed on a TV set dropped to 70 percent in February 2008 from 75 percent in February 2007.

While oldteevee was dropping, video watching on PCs grew to 19 percent in 2008, up from from 11 percent in 2007. According to Ipsos, of the 52 percent of Americans 12 and older who have ever streamed or downloaded video content, roughly one out of every five hours of video content is watched on the PC.

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In his post on last week’s launch of new video startup Independent Comedy Network, Chris Albrecht expressed doubts as to whether there’s room for another site built around funny video, especially in a market where even star-studded offerings on sites like FunnyOrDie and SuperDeluxe regularly go unnoticed. Having watched the first episodes of each of ICN’s initial five offerings, I’m not crazy about a lot of it, but there’s so far one show which seems to make the whole enterprise worthwhile. 2/8 Life, a spoof of the much-discussed quarterlife, is so smart and funny that it could easily render the target of its satire obsolete.

In a clear reference to My So-Called Life, creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s much-beloved 90s TV show,2/8 Life’s four main characters are named Angela, Brian, Rayanne and Jordan. This is maybe more of a substantial inside wink than it first appears to be. quarterlife often plays as though there’s been an attempt to show Angela Chase and friends “all growned up,” although as I noted in my review, it rarely strives for MSCL’s multiple levels of address. Angela is our precocious video-blogger, a self-possessed but barely self-aware smirker who insists that her video diary is about “making a difference.” Brian is the “best friend” who loves her, Rayanne is the slutty Craig’s List-sourced actress roommate, and Jordan is a moody musician — just like Jordan Catalano, but the young Jared Leto’s brown-eyed paragon of cool is swapped out for a chubby dude who is apparently really into that apotheosis of self-indulgent faux-bohemia, Rent.

2/8 works on a couple of levels. It’s a dead-on parody of the ways in which quarterlife seems to miss the point about contemporary youth culture –– particularly Internet culture –– but it also offers a corrective to quarterlife’s lack of self-criticality. Casual racism, economic Peter Pan syndrome, romantic solipsism –– it’s all there. Where quarterlife seems to aim only to mirror the lives of the young white people that it hopes to appeal to (which is why even the show’s minor gaps in realism are generally so infuriating), 2/8 starts by mirroring quarterlife, and goes on to intelligently skewer the selfish, hypocritical real-life types that quarterlife glorifies without critique.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke exclusively hosted Speechless, a series of short videos starring A-list talent that was produced and conceived by B-list talent and designed to promote United Hollywood’s position by dramatizing the impact of the writers’ strike on the art form.

“For the first time in the TV and movie industry, high-profile SAG actors are together taking their talents directly and exclusively to the Internet,” the press release boasted (somewhat erroneously — Speechless player Eva Longoria is one of many high-profile SAG actors who has previously taken her talents directly to FunnyorDie, just to name a single example).

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