In case you missed it, Ofcom released another excellent report yesterday — this time about broadband. Click here for the 56-page pdf document.

I was discussing some new media regulation issues with a friend last night and today and — whilst searching the internet — saw that Microsoft had just announced Halo2 gamers had logged 800 million hours of online play on the Xbox Live platform. Yeah, that’s not a typo: 800 million hours. Halo2 is probably the most popular media product of all time. Recent advertising acquisitions underscore this point: Microsoft acquired Massive last year and Google just acquired Adscape — both are specialist firms that offer in-game advertising.

So, reading the Ofcom report this morning, I had video games on my mind. Most of the report is geared toward the top-line, important things we should know about broadband — its cost and availability / speed and take-up. But when Ofcom discusses the benefits and consumer uses of broadband, the discussion is very much geared toward things Ofcom apparently finds interesting: television-like experiences and web 2.0 websites. That’s great and I don’t have any huge reason to doubt that Ofcom’s research contains flaws in that respect.

But why is there an almost total absence of online video gaming in these types of reports?

To be fair, Ofcom does mention online video games in Section 3.3 of the report, claiming that 38% of adults play video games online. That’s a very high percentage in my opinion… and something worth exploring, but Ofcom seemed not to ask the same questions of 16-24 year-olds or to really think about what it means. Overall, I would say that Ofcom still does not consider this area of the market to be worth investigating. It shows in subtle ways. For example, Figure 20 of the report depicts the twenty most popular websites in the UK for January 2007. The data is interesting, but it has the potential to mislead — by focusing on websites instead of internet applications (like Xbox Live) Ofcom probably mis-reports what’s popular online.

It was just about two years ago that the UK’s gaming industry association, ELSPA, told OfcomWatch that U.K. policymakers were ‘out of touch’ with respect to the impact of the video game industry. I don’t think much has changed since then.