Howcast, the instructional video site founded by three ex-Googlers, today announced that it has formed distribution agreements with AOL, Metacafe, Bebo, and blip.tv.

Howcast provides professionally produced instructional videos that range from “How to Make Sushi” to “How To Make a Water Gun Alarm Clock“. Many films come from the site’s Directors Program, which pays qualified members a small fee to produce guides that follow a supplied Howcast template. Directors receive increased compensation through a rev-share system for especially popular videos.

Howcast says that the new distribution deals will significantly expand its audience. The site had previously established distribution agreements with Myspace, YouTube, Verizon FiOS TV, Joost, and ROO.

Howcast has a number of competitors in this space, including 5min, Videojug, and to some extent, Instructables.

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Israeli paper The Marker is reporting (in Hebrew) that one of the Metacafe founders who recently cashed out and left has turned his attention to business recruitment technology.

Arik Czerniak is now working on Clear Applications, a company that he co-founded seven months ago with two other Metacafe ex-employees, Oren Blatt and Gil Solomon. The startup is developing analytics tools that will help medium and large-sized businesses filter through thousands of job applications and identify those candidates with the best personal and cognitive skills.

Blatt, a former fighter pilot for the Israeli air force, holds the position of CEO. The company reportedly has six employees and is self-funded. No word yet on when they might launch their product, but it’s definitely not imminent; the Clear Applications website still points to a parked page.

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The co-founders of once-hot video startup Metacafe, Arik Czerniak (pictured with his nephew son) and Ofer Adler, have left the company and cashed out their shares for $5 million, according to an article in the Israeli paper The Marker (in Hebrew). Czerniak stepped down as CEO in February, 2007, when he was replaced by former Electronic Arts executive Erick Hachenburg, but stayed on the board. Adler was always an adviser and investor, and remains at IncrediMail, another company he co-founded long ago. Now both have severed ties with the Metacafe. An autoreply from Czerniak’s Metacafe email account says:

All,
As of 20.3 I’m no longer using this email.

[Updated with corrections: Due to a prior error in translation from the Hebrew, we reported earlier that both founders together had a 5 percent stake, but each one actually had a 5 percent stake, or 10 percent total). Both Czerniak’s and Adler’s shares together represented only 5 percent each of the company, and had fully vested. Each reportedly received $2.5 million, but their shares were not priced at the company’s most recent round of funding. Rather, the price was based on an earlier valuation of $50 million. The company has raised more than $45 million so far, with a $30 million round as recently as last August. And back in late 2006 it unsuccessfully tried to shop itself around for $200 to $300 million. The article cites conflicts with Hachenburg and the strategic direction of the company. But maybe they just didn’t think anyone would ever buy it.

Metacafe is still one of the top video-sharing sites, with 28 million unique visitors worldwide in March, according to comScore. But it’s growth has been pretty lackluster all year (up 15 percent). Meanwhile, YouTube keeps widening the gap with nearly ten times as many worldwide unique visitors, 288 million, and a faster growth rate (up 78 percent). And in the same period, Veoh’s worldwide uniques have more than tripled to 17.5 million. These numbers do not include embedded videos for either service, but they give a good indication of the overall popularity of each site.

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Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.

But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)

The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.

In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)

Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.

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Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience - which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position - we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.

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Social video site Revver has paid $1 million to video producers and their affiliates over the past year, the company says (pdf). Today also marks the service’s one-year anniversary. Revver generates revenue from pre and post roll advertisements that play in video content in their embeddable player.

Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). This implies total revenue of $2-2.5 million in the last year depending on if there are distributors to be paid. Of course, if they have sweatheart deals with some content providers, that revenue total could be lower, even significantly lower.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.

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Video sharing site MetaCafe launched a new area of their site today - it uses the Digg API to show the most popular MetaCafe videos.

Viewers can sort by most dugg, highest rated, most discussed, most viewed, etc. Only Metacafe videos are shown.

Digg’s video channel and Metacafe overlap somewhat, particularly for people who just want to quickly find and browse interesting videos. That makes this pairing somewhat unlikely - I would have expected Metacafe to simply build their own Digg-like voting system or use Pligg’s open source software (see VideoSift’s similar functionality, which was recently in the news). The fact that they are working with Digg shows that they are willing to hitch their brand to that shooting star, damn the competitive angle.

Metacafe released a press release this afternoon on the new functionality. Notably absent from the release was Digg, who did not jointly release it, or provide a quote. (Update - see comment #2 below).

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The rumors around a possible Metacafe acquisition continue to swirl around silicon valley, with Yahoo or Microsoft being considered the most likely acquiror, at a $300 millionish acquisition price. Another potential acquiror is a rumored industry consortium looking to buy its way into the space. We’ve gotten confirmation from a number of potential acquirors that the company hired Lehman Brothers to shop them around, and were asking for $200-$300 million.

But we are hearing that those discussions may have stalled due to the recent release of November Comscore traffic numbers. The number of monthly unique visitors to Metacafe continues to decline from a high of 4.2 million in September, to just 3.1 million in November, a drop of approximately 25%. Total page views are relatively flat over this period, going from 97 million in September to 101 million in November.

Acquirors are also expressing concern over the relatively large percentage of “adult content” hosted by Metacafe - a profitable but difficult business to be in.

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Metacafe, the video sharing site, is reportedly being sold for between $200-300 million. The buyer is currently unknown but there is speculation that it may be Yahoo.

In July, Metacafe recieved $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. The company was founded in 2004 and has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

We are currently calling press reps at Yahoo to inquire about the acquisition, which would be surprising, given their recent commitment to reorganization.

When we covered Metacafe’s funding news, we called it a hybrid between YouTube and Fark.

Update: We’ve taken a look at Metacafe’s Comscore stats relative to YouTube. Comscore reports that Metacafe had 3.8 million unique visitors and 83 million page views in October 2006. That compares to YouTube’s 23 million unique visitors and 1.5 billion page views. These stats are U.S. only.

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Israel based video sharing MetaCafe has announced that it has received $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. Founded in 2004, MetaCafe uses a filtering algorithm to prescreen videos before they appear on the site. A desktop client is used to upload and download the videos, only about two dozen of which are newly approved each day. The end results of that filtering are viewed by 20 million unique visitors each week. Instead of a YouTube style fat pipe of content, MetaCafe relies on just a tiny number of high-quality selected videos to drive a large amount of traffic. It’s like YouTube meets Fark.

Benchmark Capital has made investments in eBay, Zillow.com, Pagflakes and many other online services. Benchmark had given MetaCafe $5 mill in a previous round of funding. Accel Partners adds Metacafe to a portfolio that includes Brightcove, comScore, RealNetworks and Walmart.com.

The company will use its new funding to ramp up its infrastructure and open an office in San Francisco.

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