More from Streaming Media Europe Conference Development Director Katherine Allen on the FutureMedia 2008 conference held in London last week:

Social networking features, such as friends’ recommendations, will play a major part in the development of the BBC’s iPlayer, according to Anthony Rose, Controller of the BBC’s Vision and Online Media Group as he kicked off day 2 of the FutureMedia conference in London. “Last year the BBC chose what you watch; this year you decide what you watch; and next year your friends will choose what you watch” commented Rose, speaking just hours after iPlayer started simulcasting all the BBC’s channels and launched iPlayer Labs. As ever, though, iPlayer controversy wasn’t far away, as Telegraph TV’s Guy Ruddle argued forcefully that the publically-funded BBC should open up the iPlayer platform to content from other providers.

Patrick Walker, Google/You Tube’s director of video partnerships revealed that YouTube’s “click-to-buy” feature, which enables quick access to digital downloads or DVD purchase and launched in the US in October, will be rolled out in the UK in the “next few months”. The recently launched Monty Python channel has been one of the first beneficiaries, according to Walker, launching its click to buy link just last week and seeing Python DVD sales reach Amazon’s top 5.

A panel discussion on the impact of the credit crunch on digital media brought delegates back to earth, although there were seeds of hope even here. The consensus was that marketing spend would continue to migrate online. “If you’ve got to choose a media sector to be in, this is the best one, unequivocably” noted Simon Nicholls, MD of Ingenious Corporate Finance.

I’m quite a bit late in picking this up and taking notice of this, but in case you might have missed it too, comScore released a report last week that cites 27.4 million UK internet users viewed 3.5 billion videos online in the month of March 2008.  Of those totals, Google Sites (i.e., YouTube which accounts for 99% of Google’s video traffic) had 48% market share, with second place BBC sites far behind with only 1.2% market share.

What surprised me was that there was such a gap between YouTube and BBC sites (and of course any of the others) — This will be worth asking Claude London about at our event in October, as well as some of the other keynote speakers, including Dailymotion (oops, did I say that out loud?) which only grabbed 0.4% of the UK audience according to comScore figures.

Other notable findings in the report:

• 81.2% of the total UK internet audience viewed online video
• The combined UK online video viewing audience watched a total of 172 million hours of video content
• 20.5 million viewers watched nearly 1.7 billion videos on YouTube.com (47.3 videos per user)
• The average online video duration was 3 minutes

And of course with yesterday’s news that Kangaroo’s release could be delayed up to 6 months because of competitive review (coverage everywhere, but our media partner paidContent:UK has a nice summary here), this gives YouTube — or some of the even smaller players — even more time to grab more market share.

Tell us, from which sites and services do you consume your online (or mobile) video?