New data from Nielsen shows that more than 10 billion videos were streamed in the U.S. in June alone, a 4 percent jump over the previous month.  YouTube took the top spot in terms of the highest volume of streams and number of unique viewers.  Yahoo, Facebook, Hulu, Google, and Microsoft sites were also high ranking in terms of viewership.  MTV Networks ranked eight in videos streamed, demonstrating the demand for online music.

Given the voracious demand for online video, it makes sense that advertising content on video sites would rise accordingly.  Now, there are new numbers from eMarketer demonstrating this explosive growth, as featured in a recent Adweek article.  According to eMarketer, right now 147.5 million Americans, or two-thirds of U.S. Internet users, tune into online video a minimum of once per month  – a number that is projected to jump to 193.1 million by 2014.  No surprise then that U.S. online video ad spending will rise too, in proportion to this growth.  This year alone, ad spending specifically related to online video will increase by 48.1%, or $1.5 billion.  Fast forward to 2014 and that number will reach $5.5 billion.

Online video isn’t the only entertainment option taking the Internet by storm this summer.  Bloomberg recently reported that e-book sales for Amazon’s Kindle outpaced hardcover sales over the last three months – marking the exponential increase of digital readership. Broadband entertainment is a growth industry, and finding the right option from an array of programming has never been so easy or enjoyable.

Be Mindful of Your Online Communications. In our modern era, many potential employers search the Internet for online information on job candidates.  In fact, a December 2009 Microsoft study found that 79% of those in hiring positions vet applicants this way, and 70% reported rejecting candidates based on what they found online.  While privacy settings can help, it’s best to ensure any blogs, tweets, or social media profiles are appropriate for any audience.

Manage Your Social Media Presence. While sites like LinkedIn can be extraordinary job networking tools, it’s important to make sure any profile is complete and aids your search.  In other words, don’t aimlessly join every network, which can result in over-saturating social media sources and presenting an incomplete or inconsistent portrait of yourself on the web.

Build Quality Relationships. Networking that leads to job results is not about amassing the highest number of online contacts possible; it’s about quality contacts that can help you reach your end goal.  Simultaneously, it’s important to engage your contacts in your employment search by simply getting the word out.  From changing your profile status to posting an update that invites your connections to share their ideas, social media can help.

With the rise of social networking, greater awareness for online reputation management is emerging.  This recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study, for example, reports that more than two thirds of social network users ages 18-29 have adjusted their privacy settings to restrict what others see online.  And 57% of adult Internet users have admitted to using a search engine to look up their names and see what appears.  Clearly, our digital awareness is growing, and when it comes to employability and marketability that’s a very good thing.

Overall, Verizon reported that electronic breaches last year involved “more insider threats, greater use of social engineering and the continued strong involvement of organized criminal groups.”  However, Verizon also noted that the overall number of breaches investigated was lower than in 2009.  Stolen credentials were cited as the most common way to gain unauthorized access, and organized criminal groups were responsible for 85% of all stolen data last year.

The Verizon investigators noted that it continues to be the case that most breaches were if security basics had been followed, and concluded that being prepared remains the best defense against security breaches.

Other key findings include: Most breaches were from ‘external’ sources, and almost 90% of the data breaches were not considered to be difficult to execute.  About half of data breaches were accomplished by privilege misuse, and almost 80% of the data breach victims were not following recommended industry security standards.

This report has recommendations for enterprises and an overview of the state of cybercrime in 2010. And a full copy of this report is available online. (The report is very comprehensive, so allow a few minutes for it to load.)

Recently released research from Northwestern and Harvard Universities examined 300 million U.S. tweets sent between 2006 and 2009 to size up trends in the national mood.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of people expressed positive emotions in the early mornings prior to work, and in the evening following the workday.  The highest heights of happiness were reached on the weekends, with maximum joy registered on Sunday mornings.

If you want to know when to steer clear of our friends and co-workers, the study can help there, too.  According to the study, around 4:00 p.m. negative emotions spike, and the study’s map becomes bright red.  Interestingly, the emotions observed during this study are consistent on both the East and West Coasts, with moods mirroring each other across the time zones.

This is not the first foray into gauging emotions via social media. At Facebook, an in-house team uses the social network to track Gross National Happiness, providing regularly updated graphs reflecting where a range of nations stand on the happiness spectrum.  The index, which tracks dozens of countries in multiple languages, observes a number of mood fluctuations due to timely events.  A World Cup soccer win or loss can send a national mood soaring or sinking; just check out the UK’s rating after England lost to Germany on June 26.  Even cultural differences play a role; for instance, people in Germany and Spain are more revelatory and happier on Christmas Eve than Christmas Day.

USTelecom strongly supports bringing broadband to everyone, but we dispute the FCC’s finding regarding reasonableness and timeliness. Here is why.

First, the FCC raised the number Americans potentially unserved to 24 million from the 14 million it estimated in the National Broadband Plan (NBP).  There was no explanation of the need for this new estimate.  For example, is the methodology that produced the higher number more accurate than the broadband availability model used in the NBP?  Regardless, the population unserved is proportionately a very small but real problem—5% to 8% of the country—which requires narrowly targeted solutions.

Second, the FCC redefined broadband, on the premise that 4/1 mbps is the minimum speed required for high quality video.  It seems reasonable to acknowledge that the old standard of 200 kbps is insufficient for the majority of subscribers. But the new standard based on high quality video capability points up a disturbing tendency among proponents of more regulation—defining competitive availability for the whole range of consumers in terms of a small portion of high end consumers.  As the FCC states, “no more than half of those that purchase high-speed Internet access service actually purchase services capable of delivering 4 Mbps download speeds.”

From an analytical standpoint, we do not want this new definition to result in disjointed data series that render historical analysis impossible.  For example, see the FCC’s recent release of redefined mobile broadband subscriber data without restated historical data.  It would make more sense to track a range of speed tiers rather than redefining broadband to exclude certain services, as FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker suggests.

More important, the tendency to focus on the high end as a gauge for policy understates competition for the mass market, providing a false premise for regulatory intervention.  For example, the NBP projects that in 2012 very high speed cable DOCSIS 3.0 will be available to 90% of the country, and fiber-to-the-home will only be available to 15% of the country. Based on this data, the plan concludes that 75% of the U.S. will have only one choice of very high speed provider.  The statistic has been misused to falsely imply that we are headed to a non-competitive market, illogically turning progress on its head and turning investment in new technologies into a liability.

• Never mind that broadband is a dynamic industry characterized by persistent, if uneven, competitive upgrade cycles—especially in the U.S. where 82% of the country has at least two competitive wired platforms.
• Never mind that 2012 represents a static snapshot in FTTH availability and that FTTH is not the only way to compete with DOCSIS 3.0 (fiber has been driven further into networks and DSL technological capabilities continue to improve).
• Never mind that multiple wireless and satellite networks, covering nearly all of the country, are projected to expand capacity over the next several years.
• Never mind that the great majority of the market at a given point in time will not demand the very highest peak speeds available.
• Finally, never mind that gloomy projections about competition by proponents of greater regulation are (a) circular, given the negative capital investment impact surrounding Title II and net neutrality and (b) self-serving, given the goal to regulate.

“No serious economist wants to clamp down on public spending or raise taxes until the economy starts creating jobs at a more rapid clip,” according to the study, written by former BusinessWeek journalist Michael Mandel. The study examined Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the industries and sectors of the economy that led the U.S. out of recessions in 1981-1983, 1990-91 and 2000.

Mandel takes note of the policy battles telecom companies are having with federal agencies over whether regulation is required “to police competition in communications.” But in his view, there should be “no rush to regulate sectors of the economy that are finally beginning to reweave the severed connections between innovation and new jobs.” Putting Americans to work is more important than regulating growing industries, he writes. “With unemployment stuck at just under 10 percent, federal policy makers would be wise to take a countercyclical approach to regulatory policy as well as fiscal policy.”

Read the memo.

However, MIT researchers Steven Bauer , William Lehr and David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who from 1981 to 1989 was the Internet’s chief protocol architect, found the methodologies for measuring for Internet data rates miscalculates the speed of the “access network,” the part of the network that Internet service providers (ISPs) control.

From free applications to commercial software, the researchers analyzed six different ways to measure the speed of Internet connections in the U.S.

Here are some examples of their findings:

• Current measurement standards disregard “tiers of service.” For example, low-tier customers with reasonably good connections were classified as high-tier customers with connections of relatively poor speeds.
• There are low measurement standards because of an idiosyncrasy in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP software determines how Internet-connected computers send data between each other. With TCP, the receiving computer tells the other computer how much data it is willing to accept at any point in time. But the sending computer won’t exceed that threshold. However, for some common computer operating systems, the researchers found that some computers had an unnecessarily low threshold. In other words, some computers were very slow in accepting data.
• Slower speeds were the result of traffic being transferred to distant servers. In one speed test, Steven Bauer, the technical lead on the MIT Internet Traffic Analysis Study (MITAS) saw his MIT-based computer skip a server in New York with too many requests to connect, so his computer was redirected to the nearest free server it could find  – in Amsterdam. As soon as the redirect happened, his high-speed broadband service slowed down considerably.

See Smart Planet’s analysis by blogger Andrew Nusca or read the study in its entirety.

Davidson and Swanson’s study, which is worth taking a look at, found that net neutrality regulations could possibly cost the economy 500,000 jobs and $80 billion per year. The report noted net neutrality could also create marketplace uncertainty, limit broadband providers’ abilities to create new business models and affect their ability to invest in new networks. According to the study, broadband service providers are expected to invest at least $30 billion annually in new fiber-optic and wireless networks between 2010 and 2015, resulting in the creation or sustainment of more than 500,000 jobs. Davidson and Swanson’s report found these investments are likely to encourage capital spending in telecom-related industries as well.

Read the study.

The study’s most interesting finding was that African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos are among the most likely to use their mobile phones to access the Internet. This is encouraging, but to harness the Internet for critical purposes such as job searches, filling out employment applications, or doing homework, families need wireline connections. Even though minorities have ample access to the web through mobile phones, wireline broadband access will still be a key factor in bridging the divide.  Unless you have no problem looking at small screen for long periods of time, it’s difficult to use a smart phone to write a cover letter and resume, apply to college or do homework because it simply isn’t the same as a using a desktop or laptop.

Pew’s study suggests mobile broadband could help bridge the “digital divide.” Using a cellphone to access the internet for quick pieces of information, maps or restaurant locations could encourage people to buy computers and sign up for in-home broadband services.  “Poorer households see wireless devices as their gateway to the Internet,” the study said.

Consider this:  seven in ten adult Internet users — or about half of all U.S. adults — have used the Internet to watch or download video.  What other trends are emerging?  Here are some other highlights, which show how video viewing has accelerated since 2007:

• Videos with an educational emphasis are now watched by 38% of adult Internet users, up from 22% in 2007.
• Tuning into movies and television programs via online video has doubled – increasing from 16% to 32%.  And 8% of online video watchers have connected their computer to their TV so that they can watch on a bigger screen.
• Online videos with political themes have also grown two-fold, rising from 15% to 30% of adult Internet users.

Interestingly, the study also shows that while younger generations are more likely to embrace online video, gender differences have disappeared.  Today, women are as likely as men to upload and share videos – a trend that has perhaps been fueled by social networking platforms, and video sites such as YouTube.  Also, today 14% of Internet users say they have uploaded a video to the Internet.  This number may not seem high – but it is twice the figure on record for video uploads in 2007.

Whether tuning into videos on funnyordie.com or watching a political speech on YouTube, broadband is bringing a rich multi-media experience that is both entertaining and educational.