Tubearoo.com Predicting Death Of Basic Cable?

Tubearoo.com, a popular(?) video-sharing site, shot out a press release today with an interesting statistic about the growing number of people viewing streaming video that I took extreme liberties with when I wrote the headline.

According to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the number of U.S. basic cable subscribers was 65.6 million in December 2006; while comScore Video Metrix reported the number of unique U.S. Internet video streamers at nearly 123 million in January 2007.

Tubearoo.com President and CEO Paul Medvedev sees this stat as “amazing” since, if you take it at face value, the number of people streaming videos is nearly double that of basic cable TV subscribers. But by “basic cable” do they mean people who just get the most basic package? And WTF qualifies you as a “streamer?” I mean, I like watching the occasional 30-second clip of some guy getting racked in the junk by his kid, but I’m not dropping my cable subscription for it.

So what’s the point of this statistic other than to fool people into believing that crappy Internet video clips on yet another video-streaming/social-networking site is relevant? Oh, I just answered my own question. Though where else am I going to get my fill of violent, homo-erotic clips like the one above?