More and more Canadians are jumping into the digital pool. That's no secret. It's all about a prevailing consumer philosophy of getting content when and where they want it. It is, however, happening at an increasingly rapid pace.

Driving this growth spurt is online video - a digital bucket that Canadians, especially, see as a favourable option.

"You're starting to see a huge trend with the acceleration of how online video's being consumed," says Graham Moysey, SVP/GM, Canwest Digital Media. "Especially as a younger demographic and generations start to consume content made in a different way."

Just look at the numbers. ComScore released a report in February, 2009 showing that 21 million Canadians watched more than 3.1 billion videos online, spending an average of 10 hours viewing during the month, up 53% from what it was the year before. That's about 88% of the total Canadian Web population, and it accounts for the highest penetration of the five countries reported by Comscore's Video Metrix, including France (82%), Germany (82%), the U.K. (81%) and the U.S. (76%).

According to BBM Canada, for total TV viewing in Canada during prime time for all persons 2+ between May 25, 2008 and May 25, 2009, tuning to Canadian and American conventional stations dropped by 3%. And though specialty viewing did increase by 1%, the remaining 2% went to programming not falling in those categories.

A lot of this can be attributed to the popularity of sites like MSN, YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook that resonate well with Canadian kiddies, all of which provide the bulk of the competition to the major networks when it comes to attracting revenue for online ads, video ads in particular.

The Comscore report indicated that out of the top Canadian video properties (according to videos viewed), Google sites (including YouTube) came out on top, taking in a whopping 52% share of all videos viewed with more than 1.6 billion, and Facebook placed seventh with over 19 million, accounting for a 0.6% share of the total.

So, how are Canadian broadcasters like CTV, the CBC and Canwest competing with the YouTubes and Facebooks of the world - while navigating the whole analog-dollars-to-digital-dimes conundrum and attracting advertisers to a space about which they've so far been fairly wary?

To start, they've begun to make their online destinations more appealing by beefing up their digital offerings with more prime-time content, especially their conventional properties.

"Content is going to remain king: always has, always will," says ZenithOptimedia president Sunni Boot. "There is a specific trend to long-form programming that typically resided on broadcast and is now nicely residing online. We're always going to be where the eyeballs are."

"We tend to buy more conventional because of the programming," adds Boot. "When you've got a top-rated show, your sell out on air can come quicker, whereas your cable specialty, there are a lot of places to go, and it's a 24-hour clock."