A few months ago, a colleague of mine made reference to the site, Hulu during a business meeting.  Hulu is an online video service that offers popular TV shows, movies and clips - all for free (but you have to be in the US to access it). A few people at the table had not heard about it, while some were raving about the service.  Regardless, it seems Hulu is now rising rapidly in popularity as recent metrics proclaim it to be the fourth largest video site in the U.S.

In February, according to the latest data from comScore VideoMetrix, Hulu drew an audience of 34.7 million people who watched 332.5 million video streams. This could be in part due to the great ad Hulu ran during the Superbowl in February. Still, that is a 42 percent increase in unique U.S. visitors, up from 24.5 million in January, and a 33 percent increase in streams, up from and 250.5 million streams. 

YouTube still dominates though, with 5.3 billion streams compared to #2 Fox Interactive MySpace with 462.6 million streams and #3 Yahoo, with 353.5 streams for that same period. But Hulu shot right ahead of Microsoft and Viacom to become #4. 

If you take a few moments to really step back from it all, it is interesting to see just how much our media consumption habits have changed and evolved.  Most important to note is that it isn’t confined to the young “digital natives” who have grown up with this technology.  From our consumption of entertainment and news, to how we shop and communicate, we can see the evident shift to on-demand, on-my-terms and on-the-move 24/7 access across the age spectrum.  Mobile is and will continue to be a major driver in how we consume our information and communicate to each other.  I have to say that it is an exciting time to be at Mindblossom where we have the opportunity to collaborate with great minds to integrate mobile ideas & solutions into the overall digital marketing mix.