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Remember last week, when CBS announced that its YouTube presence had lifted its audience figures? Letterman was up five percent in the month since they’d started posting excerpts on the service.

Well, today, the BBC publishes research that suggests the contrary:

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising - three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

So what does that mean? Is internet video good for TV viewing figures, like CBS said, or bad, like the BBC says?

In part, the answer may lie in the methodology employed. Asking people what they do does not return the same results as measuring what they really do. People try to please researchers, and they represent themselves as the person they want to be. They might also not really know where their time goes.

There’s another way of reconciling the results. It also might mean that our television viewing is becoming more filtered. Internet fans are watching less, but they are watching more of the shows that create a buzz on the net. It’s the long tail of television that’s suffering not the fat head of the Simpsons, Family Guy, the Daily Show and the other top YouTube favourites.

Elsewhere: Michael Urlocker discusses how the broadcast business might respond to this disruption. Antony Mayfield thinks the trend will continue.

It’s always been obvious that watching 5-minute segments of TV programmes on YouTube is likely to increase people’s desire to watch the real thing. Pete Cashmore reports that yesterday, some proof has emerged. US TV network CBS has announced that viewer figures have risen considerably since striking a deal to create their own channel on the video-sharing service. The release says that “Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers.” This is remarkable common sense given the current trend for mainstream media companies to sue anything that moves on the Internet. After just one month, the release continues:

CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%) since the YouTube postings started.

Letterman’s interview with Borat has been viewed more than 1.4mn times over three weeks. It’s not difficult to imagine some of those people thinking, “Oh. Letterman is sometimes funny. I should check it out.” On the other hand, it’s very hard to imagine anyone thinking, “Well, I don’t need to watch that show now because two-and-a-half minutes of it have been posted here.”

David Poltrack, CBS’s chief research officer told Ad Age last week:

“We’re in a position right now where no one wants to take [content off YouTube] … When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers.”

Albert Cheng of the ABC-Disney TV group added that the success of YouTube is about a different sort of viewing experience to that offered on mainstream TV:

The video-sharing site may have capitalized on the needs of the short-attention-span young adult on a widespread basis, but it’s not the be-all, end-all of accessing TV-related content.

“You wouldn’t want to watch ‘Lost’ broken into 50 pieces,” Mr. Cheng said. “There’s just more different use cases that are allowing users to control how they watch content.”

Cashmore speculates that the recent lawsuits lined up against YouTube by Universal Music, Comedy Central, Time Warner and others aren’t so much about intellectual property, but rather provide a bargaining chip to secure better distribution deals with the network. This sounds like a reasonable interpretation to me, though perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of fear and stupidity in some of these companies.