The folks with their fingers on the digital pulse of the world are publishing some interesting – but not necessarily surprising – findings about the growing consumption of online video content.

According to the latest research and accompanying data from comScore, 178 million US Internet users watched online video content in June for an average of 16.8 hours per viewer.

The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 6.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month, an all-time high.

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As widely speculated last week, Facebook’s “awesome” announcement Wednesday involved the social networking giant’s integration with Skype for an entirely new video calling platform that promises to once again revolutionize the way we interact with friends and family via Facebook.

Now when you’re on a friend’s profile, there will be a new button located between the ‘Message’ and ‘Poke’ buttons. The added button says ‘Call.’ Once you click the button, the friend will receive a popup message asking whether they want to accept or decline the call. If they accept, you will be immediately connected for a video chat.

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While mobile video is still a very small percentage of Online video consumption, Apple already has a commanding lead on all other platforms in terms of overall views.

As part of its Q1 2011 Video Monetization Report, video advertising startup FreeWheel indicates that over 80% of all mobile video views in the U.S. are derived from iOS devices — including iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  The iPhone and iPod Touch each account for about 30 percent of all video views that happen on mobile devices, with the remaining 20 percent being attributed to Android devices, according to the report.  ”Other devices” account for less than 1 percent of all video views on mobile devices, according to the company.

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Netflix may have as many subscribers as some cable television providers, but the popular video rental and streaming service has no plans to formally compete with its cable TV counterparts.

With 22.8 million paying customers – comparable to that of Comcast’s subscriber base – Netflix has been perceived by many as a threat to traditional cable TV media consumption, particularly given the company’s recently expressed appetite for original programming.

But not so fast, says Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Speaking this week at the Wired business conference in New York, Hastings said there’s no plans to compete with cable.

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Google announced over the weekend that the Internet search giant is officially pulling the plug on its video service.

In other words, if you have any valuable videos stored exclusively on the platform, now would be a great time to backup or preserve those clips elsewhere.

“Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback,” Google stated in an email to Google Video users.

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Blinkx, the popular video search engine, is planning to acquire online advertising company Burst Media.

The deal, which was announced Friday, stipulates that Blinkx will pay Burst $30 million in stock and cash. For the time being, Burst’s senior management will remain on the job to assist in the forthcoming transition.

According to Blinkx, Burst enjoyed better than $37 million in revenue for 2010, an improvement over the $31.4 million it generated in 2009.

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Charlie Sheen may have recently made a splash on Ustream but it’s Ustream itself that’s “winning.”

On the heels of major news stories that span natural disasters to international political uprisings, millions of unique users are turning to Ustream, which is seeing unprecedented growth as countless new broadcasters and viewers embrace the online video streaming portal.

Lynn Fox, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Ustream, tells Tech Crunch that the platform “hit 10 million total broadcaster signups at the end of February, averaging a rounded 20% growth month over month since December.”

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