The company says Metacafe Movies will offer original programming, behind-the-scenes clips, trailers and a 3-D showcase. The site will also feature a section for HD movie trailers along with a guide to summer blockbusters.

"Our singular focus is on building the premier movie and entertainment online video site, delivering a great experience for our viewers and valuable marketing results to our advertisers," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe.

Metacafe Movies Launched! – The most popular videos are here

"The launch of Metacafe Movies is an important milestone in this endeavour and one that we will continue to build on in the coming months."

The Metacafe Movies editorial team includes people formerly of Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes who will curate the content on the site.

Metacafe says it has increased its movies-related advertising revenues by more than 70 percent over the past year and it’s hoping its new movie site will help to continue that trend.
 

"Online video is increasingly a primary source of entertainment for today’s consumers, so it’s important we showcase content in key entertainment categories – such as video games – about which people are passionate," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe.

"We’ve developed our new hub to make it easy for viewers to find the freshest, most compelling game-related videos, which creates valuable opportunities for advertisers who want to reach them."

EA is the initial sponsor for the video games hub, promoting its new racing game "Need for Speed Shift."  The campaign includes prominent exposure within the hub, an interactive home page skin, and a combination of custom and standard media across the site.

"Closely aligning with premium video game content and reaching our target consumers when and where they’re engrossed in the entertainment experience is central to our marketing strategy," said Tabitha Hayes, Director of Marketing for EA.

"Teaming with Metacafe as the charter sponsor of its new Video Games hub is an effective and efficient way for us to build further awareness for Need for Speed Shift."

Content partners include IGN and GamePro. Additional content and new content partners will be integrated into the hub in the coming weeks and months.

Metacafe said it will promote its video games hub across the site so users can find the entertainment content they are looking for and provide brand extension for its hub sponsors.

Metacafe’s other recently launched hubs include TV Clips, Movie Trailers, Music Videos and Sports Highlights.

It seems fair that, if someone sits through an entire video, the experience gets counted as one view.  But what if someone watches half a second and then clicks on the "back" button?  Or if someone or something behind a single IP address refreshes a video 200 times?

TubeMogul found that YouTube, MySpace, and Yahoo Video are willing to count views in all of these scenarios.  A number of less well-known sites take the same approach, too.  Metacafe and Blip.tv stand out with stricter standards, only adding to tallies when half (or at least 30 seconds’ worth) of videos are watched, and not when they’re refreshed repeatedly.

 The Evolution Of Dance On YouTube

This doesn’t necessarily make Metacafe and Blip heroes; if they’d conform to YouTube’s standards, at least the inconsistencies would be eliminated.  Still, it’s the sort of thing people should keep in mind when they’re looking at view counts.  About 86 million individuals – or a group greater in size than the population of Germany – probably haven’t sat through "The Evolution of Dance" in its entirety.

Also, as Michael Learmonth notes, TubeMogul has looked at these measurements before.  "The biggest difference since their first test last June?  Both YouTube and Yahoo lowered their standards.  Previously, both logged only one view per IP address and now both count multiple views from the same computer the moment the user presses play."

Total user-generated videos published in 2007 reached an estimated 1.2 million, along with 26.5 million related comments.

Accustream found that MySpace TV’s library averaged 36.9 comments per video in 2007, while Metacafe videos received an average of 32.3, followed by YouTube at 25.4.

MySpace TV video received more comments than those on the other sites because of a focus on semi-professional and professional content.

Accustream said that comments could be a useful tool for marketers. "User comments are an indication of content engagement intent and underlying motivation," said Paul A. Palumbo, the company’s research director.

"Comments reflect interactive activity meaningful to brands, publishers and advertisers, particularly as a community’s conversation about video becomes intrinsic to CPM value. Video is visual and visceral," Palumbo said.
 

An official statement explains, "VideoEgg‘s Eggnetwork Advertising Platform (EAP) . . .  now allows deployment of video advertising in any Flash environment.  With EAP for Video, high-quality publishers can easily integrate VideoEgg’s invitation-based video advertising into their existing video platform – enabling sites to earn revenue by delivering unique in-video ads to their community."

So Metacafe, Imeem, and Buzznet can accommodate a rush of new advertisers without reassigning (or hiring) an equal number of programmers.  And VideoEgg gains access to an estimated 50 million unique users.  Not bad, eh?

Of course, any financial details related to the deal remain undisclosed, so if one party or another is getting the short straw, we aren’t likely to hear about it.  This seems like the sort of thing companies would willingly pay to achieve, however, so the details might be of little relevance, anyway.

Finally, we’ll note that the last time we wrote about VideoEgg, it had just earned $15 million in funding; this isn’t a bad trend for any company.

Users can mashup videos from Metacafe, Liveleak, and CollegeHumor, in addition to the video sites already indexed, into a Searchles TV channel. The video additions are part of Searchles goal to offer users a single media platform that provides more creative options and user controls in managing posted video content from multiple sources, while also using the social video search influenced by a user’s groups and friends.

"We recognized the growing popularity with web users of these video sites that are full of great content. Given the almighty law of user-demand, it was only logical to offer the means to index them to our site and enable users to add them to their Searchles TV channels," said Chris Seline, CTO of Searchles.

"YouTube and Google Video are clearly still the big players in video content, but it is important to let our users take advantage of the ever-expanding competition as well — particularly if we are striving to offer our users the best social video search spanning all available popular video sources on the web. That being said, we’ll continue to keep an eye out for other video sites that emerge onto the playing field going forward."

Currently Searchles indexes video from YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video and Blip.tv.

The channel features Metacafe video that has been "Dugg." Users can find videos that are the "Most Dugg" and "Recently Dugg" on Digg.

By using combined input from these two community sites, Metacafe is offering another way to find videos that are the most popular with viewers. With the Digg Channel, users can see what videos members of Digg favor along with what is popular in the Metacafe community. The Digg Channel is being promoted throughout the Metacafe Web site, and Digg is featuring the channel on the Digg site.

"The Digg Channel illustrates our commitment to putting viewers in charge of their online entertainment experience," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe.

"Like Digg, we are all about exposing the content our community deems best and making it easy for people to discover something they’re likely to enjoy. This shared philosophy makes the Digg Channel a great addition to our site."

Metacafe uses audience feedback to promote the most popular videos. Its review panel of 80,000 volunteers takes a first look at the videos that are submitted to the site each day. Its VideoRank system measures each user’s interactions and reactions to a video, highlighting those that receive the best response.

That’s what some Hitwise data suggests, anyway, and investors such as Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures, which contributed to the $30 million, are surely hoping such a change will take place.

“Over the past four years Metacafe has built a large and global audience, which has grown quite significantly throughout 2007,” stated Tom Goodrich, a partner at DAG Ventures.  “We expect the growth to continue as Metacafe rolls out new ways of tapping its community to customize the viewing experience for audience members in different regions around the world.”

Goodrich, by the way, is using “we” in a different sense than you might expect – thanks to the funding round, he and Richard de Silva (of Highland Capital Partners) will join Metacafe’s board of directors.

Anyway, video sites Break.com and Veoh (currently sixth and seventh, respectively) are Metacafe’s most likely victims.  MSN Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video, MySpaceTV, and YouTube complete the climb to the top, but Metacafe would need a lot more help to take on those competitors.

Hat tip to VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall.

ClipBlast To Index Metacafe Video

Metacafe automatically promotes the most popular video content on its site, so viewers can find something they are likely to want to watch. The VideoRank system measures viewer’s interaction with and reactions to videos, and displays the ones that receive the best audience response.

"As video continues to proliferate on the web, it becomes increasingly important that we organize content in a way that makes it quick and easy for people to find something they’re likely to enjoy," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe.

"We’ve designed our site to meet that imperative, and ClipBlast!’s automatic indexing capability is another great way for people to find interesting and entertaining videos on Metacafe."

ClipBlast’s Video Navigator interface is designed according to how people interact with online video, allowing viewers to search, browse and personalize video.

"Our entire focus is making the Video Web accessible to as many people as possible, and this relationship is a key part of that promise," said Gary Baker, founder and CEO of ClipBlast!

"Metacafe has a wealth of content from a multitude of providers the world over. We’re now providing another platform from which viewers can find and enjoy that video."

Users can subscribe to channels that fit their interest and receive daily email alerts if one of their channels has been updated.

Visitors to the site can surf channels using a variety of sorting criteria, including the earnings a producer has made through the Producer Rewards program, which pays $100 for every 20,000 views of original video. Metacafe has plans to add advanced search functionality and more subscription tools in the coming months.

"Metacafe has always empowered our audience to decide what videos appear and are featured on the site," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe.

"Introducing personalized channels is a natural next step in advancing audience-driven programming and fostering an environment where people know they’ll be entertained. We expect these channels to prove especially popular among our producers who can now showcase their videos more easily to a large and diverse audience."