Last night, we opened our new homepage features to our users in the UK. If you’re viewing Metacafe from the UK, you now can see the same rotating billboard and options for setting your Metacafe homepage that have been available in the US. In addition, we have new movie trailers, music videos, and sports highlights hubs that are specifically tailored for the UK, and a new team in the UK that will be bringing the best videos from the UK to Metacafe. Here’s a quick overview of the hubs:

Movie Trailers, featuring theatrical and home video releases from every major Hollywood studio including HD videos.

Music Videos, featuring top artists and up-and-coming acts in Pop, Rock, Metal, Electronic, R&B and Hip Hop

Sports Highlights, featuring a raft of videos from Omnisport.tv, which includes leading European club and International football, ATP tennis, PGA Tour golf and much more.

To read more about the redesign, please see this previous blog post.

Enjoy!

The Metacafe Team

A couple months ago, we made a big revamp to Metacafe with a new homepage and hubs for movie trailers, music videos, and sports highlights. Building on the very positive response we’ve received for these hubs, we are excited to announce the launch of our latest hub for TV clips!

Click here to visit the TV Clips hub

Check out the TV Clips hub to find the latest and most popular clips, interviews, and promos for your favorite and upcoming TV shows. We’ve also included easy navigation to browse by show, and of course, it’s easy to search for your favorite shows at the top of the channel as well. Here’s just a taste of what the hub will offer:

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Update: Tickets are sold out.

Metacafe is co-sponsoring a Techcrunch screening of the new Star Trek movie in Tel Aviv, Israel. If you happen to be in the city, please join in on the fun at the Blogus Movie Theater in the Azrieli Center this Thursday, the 21st at 7pm. There are 320 seats available - come see this terrific movie with us!

Tickets are $2 to minimize no-shows. You can reserve your ticket online here. Thanks to Techcrunch for organizing!

With this posting, Metacafe is today announcing the termination of the Metacafe Producer Rewards^® program effective June 30, 2009.

Metacafe was among the first in the industry to reward independent producers for their online video successes, and we are proud of the fact that we subsidized the program in an effort to help lead the development of the online video industry. While we have worked to maintain the Producer Rewards^® program during the past year, we are now faced with a market environment that requires us to focus on profitability in the near term and are not in the position to continue to subsidize the program.

This has been a difficult decision. We value our independent producers and your work. We sincerely hope you’ll continue to be part of the Metacafe community, and we will continue to work with independent producers to create new opportunities and to realize financial success.

We will provide more details on how the program wind-up will work in the upcoming days and weeks, but here is an overview:

- Videos that are currently part of the Producer Rewards^® program will continue to accrue earnings through June 30, 2009. Payments will be made following the end of each month, consistent with our past payment practices. If the amount of money owed to you as of June 30, 2000 is less than $100, we will nonetheless make payment to you.

- Videos that are currently a part of the Producer Rewards^® program will be removed from the site on July 1, 2009 unless you affirmatively elect to maintain your video(s) on the site on an uncompensated basis and not as part of the Producer Rewards^® program.

­ - If you are a producer who has had videos previously accepted into the program and wish to keep those videos on Metacafe, you must send an e-mail to PRTermination@metacafe.com no later than June 30, 2009. The e-mail should state that you want your videos to remain on Metacafe and needs to include your full name, your Metacafe user name and a link to your Metacafe channel. Your videos will then be transitioned into the Metacafe Producer™ program, which provides recognition that you are the creator of and rights holder to this original work, but they will no longer be eligible for payment.
­
- However, if you wish to remove your Producer Rewards^® videos from the program immediately, please send an email to PRTermination@metacafe.com from the email registered to your Metacafe account stating your user name and that you would like to remove your Producer Rewards^® videos from the website. We will honor these requests within three business days.

- We will no longer be accepting new videos into the Producer Rewards^® program, effective immediately.

­ - If you have submitted a video to be considered for acceptance into the Producer Rewards^® program but have not received an acceptance notification, then your videos will remain on the site but will not become a part of the Producer Rewards^® program. You may remove any video that has not been accepted into the Producer Rewards® program yourself at any time by logging into your account.

Many of you will certainly have questions about this process. Please email us your questions at PRTermination@metacafe.com. While we won’t be able to answer them all individually, we will compile them and will take them into account in our future communications about the process. You can also visit our Producer forums as well.

Thank you again for your participation in the program.

The Metacafe Team

If you use Metacafe Starter as your browser’s homepage, you’ll notice that the page loads up much faster than before. That’s because we’re now using Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator technology to cache the page, which is technical speak for “this page loads so fast that your browser might catch on fire.”

If you’re not familiar with Metacafe Starter, it’s a lightweight web page we’ve designed for you to use as your browser’s homepage. Metacafe Starter allows you to do a variety of Google searches as well as see the top videos of the day on Metacafe.

To set the page as your browser’s homepage, follow these simple instructions for Firefox or Internet Explorer:

Firefox 3.0+:
1. Open http://starter.metacafe.com in a new window.
2. Click on the “Tools” menu and go to “Options.”
3. Select the “Main” tab.
4. In the “Startup” area, make sure “When Firefox starts” is set to “Show my homepage.”
5. Click on the “Use Current Page” button.
6. Click on OK

Internet Explorer (7.0+):
1. Open http://starter.metacafe.com in a new window.
2. Click on the “Tools” menu and go to “Internet Options.”
3. In the Home page area, click on the “Use current” button.
4. Click on OK.

After several weeks of testing, we are excited to officially launch Metacafe’s new design to everyone in the U.S.!

In addition to the new look of the homepage, there are new “hubs” with the latest movie trailers, music videos, and sports highlights. Here’s a bit more detail about each hub:

Movie Trailers, featuring theatrical and home video releases from every major Hollywood studio including HD videos.

Music Videos, featuring top artists and up-and-coming acts in Pop, Rock, R&B, Hip Hop, Country, and Latin.

Sports Highlights, featuring non-stop action from the NBA, Fox Sports, and Fuel TV.

Additionally, we’re still showcasing the best videos submitted by the community in the Today and Popular Videos sections, so don’t worry…the “old” Metacafe isn’t going anywhere.

Rotating Billboard
The most noticeable change is what we call the “Rotating Billboard” at the top of the homepage and hubs, which is designed to quickly show you the freshest videos on Metacafe. You’ll notice one of its coolest features on some of the billboards: a built-in video player:

In the screenshot above, you’ll see that the video player is currently playing a movie trailer for the upcoming animated film, 9, but that there are also options to watch other trailers like Land of the Lost, Fast and the Furious, and more.

Your Homepage
What if you care only about sports videos? You can set the Sports Highlights hub as your default Metacafe homepage by clicking the “Set as my Metacafe homepage” box near the top of the hub. The next time you go to http://www.metacafe.com you will go straight to Sports Highlights. You can do this with any of the hubs or the Today section.

You can easily set your default homepage in any of the hubs or the Today section.

Coming Soon…
We hope you’re excited by these changes at Metacafe. Over the course of the year, we’ll be adding additional content into these new hubs and introducing additional hubs featuring content such as TV clips and video game trailers. We’ll also be launching the new design in other countries outside of the U.S., so stay tuned!

The Metacafe Team

We’re happy to let you know that we’ve added support for Twitter on our video pages. You can now tweet about a video by clicking on the Twitter logo just below the video player:

Don’t forget, you can also follow Metacafe on Twitter.

iA produces an annual “map” called the Web Trend Map, one of the coolest visualizations of the Internet that maps the most influential web sites onto the Tokyo Metro map. For the third year in a row, Metacafe is on the map - you can check it out below (we’re on the orange “Creative” line on the right side of the map):

This year, iA has also added a list of most influential Internet people. Metacafe’s Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Eyal Hertzog, is also on the list!

[Update on April 9, 2009: Added screenshots of the new homepage and hub designs.]

You may have noticed last week that we introduced a new look and feel for Metacafe. Hopefully you like the changes so far… because we’re not done yet! In the next few weeks, we’ll be testing out a completely new homepage and “hubs” to a small portion of our users, which will look something like this:

Preview of the new Metacafe homepage

Preview of the new Music Video hub

The new design will allow you to view larger videos on the homepage itself, while we showcase the freshest and best video clips from content creators such as the NBA, Sony Music Entertainment, The Onion, and Metacafe favorites like Kipkay. We’ve also created specific hubs for upcoming movie trailers, the latest sports highlights, and great music videos.

Get a Sneak Peek Here
Click on the image below to check it out. Please note that the sneak peek is only available to those living in Australia, Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, and United States.

The new design will become your new homepage, unless you clear your cookies or click on the image below.

We want to know what you think – drop us a note in the comments section below, our Facebook group, or send a tweet to @Metacafe.  Blog comments will need to be approved first due to issues with spam.

Enjoy!

The Metacafe Team

First off, Happy New Year! The Metacafe Team has already been hard at work in 2009 on a host of new features, which you’ll hear about in the upcoming months. One feature in particular – Wikicafe, has already seen many new enhancements and we wanted to take the time to go over them today. As always, please give us feedback in the Wikicafe Forums.

Administrative Features:
We’ve focused a lot of effort in combating spammers and protecting users from vandalism. Here are some features that are related to this battle:

- Blocking and banning spammers and vandals: Metacafe staff and Admins can now block or ban from editing registered and anonymous editors who attempt to spam or vandalize video clips. They can block specific IP addresses and also prevent anonymous editors from creating new accounts.

- SPAM blacklist: Wikicafe prevents users from saving an edit if the change contains a keyword found in our blacklist.

- Page protection: Metacafe staff and Admins can block a page from additional edits in case of spam, vandalism, or edit wars. This includes the ability to protect a specific video from all edits, or edits only to the video’s title and description.

Communication Features:

- Talk Notification: If someone leaves a message on your Talk Page, you will see the following message appear the next time you visit Metacafe:

…and you might receive a message from one of our friendly Welcoming Committee members!

Happy editing!

The Metacafe Team