Time Warner sites finish fifth in video streaming derby

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) sites rank fifth in the new ComScore survey of streaming video which covers the month of August 2006. There were almost seven billion streams initiated during the month. The average US streamer watched two streams a day.

Fox Interactive, which includes MySpace, ranked first with 1.4 billion streams. Second was the Yahoo! sites with 823 million.YouTube was third with 688 million. Viacom Digital, which includes MTV, finished fourth with 284 million streams. While Google Inc.(NASDAQ:GOOG) ranked seventh with 102 million streams, it will obviously add the YouTube numbers to its total, which would put it close to Yahoo! for the second spot.

Time Warner properties, including AOL and CNN.com, finished in fifth place with 238 million streams in August. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) sites, which would include MSN, finished sixth with 186 million.

The study underscores the difficulty and AOL and MSN are facing in catching Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Google/YouTube in key metrics like unique visitors and video streams. For either of them to pull even with the leaders, they would almost certainly have to agree to a business combination of some kind.

Fifth or sixth place may not cut it.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.