Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. In September 2010, it reported that it was hosting more than 5 billion images. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhone, BlackBerry and for Windows Phone 7, but not for other mobile devices. Several third party apps offer alternatives such as flickr HD for the iPad.

Website: www.flickr.com

Photobucket

Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[2][3] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.

In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket. [4]

In June 2010, Photobucket was named in the Lead411's Hottest Seattle Companies list.[5]

Photobucket is usually used for personal photographic albums, remote storage of avatars displayed on internet forums, and storage of videos. Photobucket's image hosting is often used for eBay, MySpace (from 2007–2009, a corporate cousin), Bebo, Neopets, and Facebook accounts, LiveJournals, Open Diarys, or other blogs, and message boards. Users may keep their albums private, allow password-protected guest access, or open them to the public.

Photobucket advertises 99.9% uptime, and offers 500MB free storage (reduced from 1GB on 19 August 2009). This reduction of storage space frustrated users, who were locked out of adding new images to their accounts unless they agreed to pay the upgrade fee. (Unlimited space with paid PRO account), Unlimited (was 100GB but went to 25GB in July 2008 and down to 10GB on August 19, 2009) monthly bandwidth.] Unlimited space and bandwidth is valid only for non-commercial use. Uploaded photos must either be smaller than 1 MB or 1024×768 in size (4000×3000 with paid account), uploaded videos must be five minutes or shorter (10 min with paid account).

Since Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit or objectionable content, they may remove content at their discretion due to violations of their TOS.

Photobucket supports FTP uploads, but the user must be a Pro account holder. Windows XP Publisher is supported as an alternative to FTP. It is available in free accounts.

Website: www.photobucket.com

Metacafe

Metacafe is a community based video sharing web site, that specializes in short-form original entertainment, where users upload, view and share video clips.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and its investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

In its early years, Metacafe was similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but has since transformed itself into a short-form video entertainment site with several differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, a different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel and VideoRank as well as the production and sourcing of exclusive video clips and the programming and curation by editors of relevant video clips. The site focuses on and features short-form videos in a variety of entertainment-related categories, including Movies, Video Games, TV, Sports and Music. In addition to its own production, original content is uploaded to the site by independent video creators, small to mid-sized production groups, and major media companies.

Website: www.metacafe.com

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005.

The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, BBC, Vevo, Hulu and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

Unregistered users may watch videos, and registered users may upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users 18 and older.

In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google.

Website: www.youtube.com