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