Introduction
Metacafe is a privately held US company. Launched in 2003, it is an online video site with offices in California, Tel Aviv and New York. It is purely an entertainment site and not sharing or hosting site. They focus plainly on short form entertainment. Surfers can download ringtones, games and sound clips from this site.
Features
On an average, the videos are normally 90 seconds long. The site does not have any personal videos, no news stories but they are purely entertaining videos which people can laugh at and feel entertained. These are user generated videos.
By clicking on the tab Studio, creators of the video can get all the information they require. The today tab will list all the videos which have been submitted that day.
Channels are personal pages of users. Using the channels tab, you can view all the registered user’s channels and even contact them. The channel allows other users to see your favorite and submitted videos. Reviewers are the first people to see any content on the site. They decide if the content is suitable for viewing by a large number of audiences or should it be filtered before going any further. Users can be a part of Metacafe reviewer committee.
Wikicafe is a feature which allows the community to edit videos in terms of tags, titles etc which allows better search results. There are community auditions, community rankings and community rewards given.
Metacafe producer rewards program awards video creators for their high-quality and creative work. There are some pre-requisites which have to be met before the video is considered eligible for this program. Some of these conditions can be that the video must be in English; it should not show any cruelty on animals, children; can be watched by 13 years and above children with no violent and erotic content and more such conditions. For the eligibility, the videos have to be 20 second long but not more than 8 minutes.
Metacafe studio gives all production tips and resources which video creators need. It gives advises on many topics like lighting, sound, editing, tools for special effects and much more.
They have a desktop application also with which surfers can download entertaining videos. Recently, Metacafe launched its music channel which features artists in all genres of music like pop, rock, hip-hop, country music, R&B, classics. Now the users can share and comments on their favorite music videos.
Tips and tricks
You must set the family filter after registering. By default, family filter is in an ON mode thus limits the content which can be viewed by everyone. Turning the filter OFF would mean items shown would be for adult audiences. Illegal, abusive, pornographic material is banned from the site. After each submission, a video footprint search is conducted to find and pick out any repeated or duplicated videos. After clearing this search, the video is posted on the site.
Newbie friendly rating
Language on their site is quite witty and not the boring with done-to-death kind of FAQ’s. This site gets the newbie rating of 9 out of 10.