Web Video Moves from the Desk to the Couch

(MoneyWatch)  It's getting easier to imagine sitting in your living room and surfing the Web from your couch -- on your television across the room.

Not that we're there yet. According to new data from Leichtman Research Group, even though 24% of all homes (measured in a 1,250 sample) have a Web-to-TV connection, only 5% overall leverage that into actual viewing. In other words, Hulu and YouTube are still largely over-the-Web viewing experiences.

But this may very well be the year of the video, and come June, we could start to see a noticeable climb in the number of Web videos viewed on TVs. That's because Boxee will release then a Web-enabled box from DLink that will plug in directly to your television. It will retail for $199 and feature a selection of videos and a way to store them and retrieve them at any time. It will also showcase Boxee, a social network centered around finding and recommending videos.

When it's easier to share videos with others, chances are people will likely consume more of them over the Web -- and their TVs. The same thing happened with sharing links to articles, a behavior that made Twitter and Facebook among the top drivers of traffic to those stories.

Another video-sharing company, Vidli, is also launching a way for moviemakers to license and share their creations over the Web -- and, ultimately, to television sets -- for a price (to be determined by each moviemaker).

Additional barriers are coming down on the technical side, too, as Adobe is working to push Flash to the TV, since it's a leading format for video.

And already, 142.7 million Americans consume video over the Internet, according to Nielsen.

We may also go mobile with our video, with the introduction of the iPad or if Netflix rolls out a service over the iPhone as some have speculated.

My prediction: We're poised to move away from surfing at our desks to surfing from the couch again.