Until recently, I can’t say that I was part of the generation that used the Internet for anything other than email, basic research, and a social site or two. It was only in the past year that I began to watch TV episodes from fox.com. But, over the holidays, I reached a tipping point and joined the ranks of the millions of viewers who seek out video. At my mother’s-in-law, my husband and I were looking for a good movie. Not finding anything at home, we reached for the laptop and checked out Netflix. A few minutes later, and National Treasure was streaming to our TV (via wi-fi). The combination of full-length movies available at the various ‘meta’ channels -- Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, Direct TV, and the like are driving fundamental changes in viewing patterns and I saw myself becoming a poster child. Everything we’re saying about the change in the ‘net to video is true. Just take a look at comScore, an analysis firm that tracks web video consumption. In its November 2008 report, the percent of online videos viewed by Americans jumped 34 percent from the same month in 2007. And, according to November’s report, the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video. I think we’re headed toward longer, richer content. Consider what we do just with email and the web -- a good 20 or 50MB of downloads a day at best. But when we downloaded our movie, National Treasure, at just over two hours it was more than 450MB. And that’s at mid-quality, 500 kbps. So consider what we’d be talking about if we wanted real DVD or HD quality. Reporting on last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in The New York Times, Saul Hansell says,”Increasingly what will differentiate one TV from another is the software it runs and the Internet services it connects to.”The huge increase in file size and video quality and the evolving way in which we view our home devices promises to drive changes in the way our access networks are built out, how we network our homes, and even in the demographics of the Internet community. And I’m not talking about early adopters. I suspect it is just a year or two before even my mother-in-law is counted as part of the 146 million Internet video viewers.