A high-definition simulcast of Living called Living HD was launched on 6 October 2009 and was the first high-definition channel from Living TV Group.

The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, 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.

Metacafe is similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but with several differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, a different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel, VideoRank, and Producer Rewards. Its VideoRank system gauges viewer reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its viewers. Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and VideoRank score through its Producer Rewards Program.
The site features short-form videos in a variety of categories, including Animation, Comedy, Entertainment, How To, News and Events, People and Stories, Sports, Video Games and others. Original content is uploaded to the site by independent video creators, small to mid-sized production groups, and major media companies.

From the Website

Metacafe is one of the world’s largest video sites, attracting more than 40 million unique viewers each month (comScore Media Metrix). We specialize in short-form original content – from new, emerging talents and established Hollywood heavyweights alike. We’re committed to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience, and we do so by engaging and empowering our audience every step of the way.

Since 2003 Metacafe has been one of the top independent online video sites, and we’re a leader in the evolution of digital entertainment. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

How is Metacafe different?

Metacafe is not a video sharing and hosting site that allows any and every video to be posted. Instead, Metacafe is a video entertainment site that focuses on:

1. Short-form – Metacafe specializes in short-form original video – content that is made for the interactive Internet medium. We don’t have full-length television episodes or movies chopped into pieces. The average video on our site is just over 90 seconds long. People come to Metacafe looking for an entertainment break in their day – and we deliver.
2. Entertainment – We’re all about entertaining a large audience by featuring only those videos that amaze, inspire and make viewers laugh. This means you won’t find hard news stories, personal videos or webcam chatter on Metacafe.
3. Audience-driven – The Metacafe experience is determined entirely by our community. Videos are user-generated, user-selected, user-reviewed and user-rewarded. At Metacafe, we put the audience in the driver’s seat, empowering viewers in a much more meaningful way than other video sites.
   • Community Auditions – A community review panel of more than 80,000 volunteers takes a first look at each of the thousands of videos submitted to the site every day.
   • Community Rankings – Our VideoRank™ system identifies and exposes the most popular videos by automatically gauging every interaction each viewer has with a video.
   • Community Rewards – Our Producer Rewards™ program pays video creators for their best original work, as determined by the viewers.

What does this all add up to? A better entertainment experience. We consistently hear from our viewers that it’s easier to find videos they like on our site as compared to others – and that keeps them coming back for more.

Other Information

• Type : Private
• Founded : July 2002
• Headquarters : Palo Alto, CA, United States
• Key people : Erick Hachenburg, CEO, Eyal Hertzog, Founder and CCO
  Eran Pilovski, CFO Jack Rotherham, SVP of Strategic Sales and
• Partnerships :  David Rice, VP of Product, Yaron Finkel, VP of R&D, Scott Bushman, VP of Business Development
• Industry : Online video entertainment
• Slogan : Video Entertainment, Powered by You
• Registration : Optional (required to upload, comment on, rate, and review videos)
• Available in : English, Spanish

Cuil’s privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, says it does not store users’ search activity or IP addresses

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.

Name

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson’s husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character called Finn McCuill. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

Some linguists are unsure of this derivation and pronunciation, and note that the modern Irish word for hazel is spelled coll (coill or cuill in genitive form, the former spelling having superseded the latter as a result of the Caighdeán Oifigiúil reforms of the mid-twentieth century). Foras na Gaeilge, the official governing body of the Irish language, doubted the assertion that ‘cuil’ means ‘knowledge’. “I am unaware myself of the meaning ‘knowledge’ being with the word ‘cuil’ in Irish,” Stiofán Ó Deoráin, an official on Foras na Gaeilge’s terminology committee, said.

The company name had previously been spelled Cuill.

Launch

Cuil’s launch (with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages) received widely critical press coverage. Concerns were expressed about the website’s slow response times, irrelevant or wrong search results and in at least one case, inappropriately pornographic images displayed alongside search results. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch questioned the validity of Cuil’s claim that it had the world’s largest search engine index and criticized it for focusing on size rather than relevance. Despite reported problems with search results, Net Applications reported that for the last three days of July, Cuil beat Google and Yahoo in the amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine, a key metric for relevancy of search results.

According to an interview with a Cuil representative, while other Web 2.0 launches using massively parallel processing might fail with a slow down or crash, Cuil’s architecture was responding with incomplete, “less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.” Cuil’s VP of communications Vince Sollitto said the search engine was experiencing heavy first-day overloads and they were “busy putting out fires.” Sollitto said Cuil “will only improve with time. It’s day one. Traffic is massive. We’re new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve.”

After the initial critical press coverage Cuil was alleged to have caused issues for some websites, owing to how the Cuil indexing robot polled certain sites. Website owners were reportedly saying the method was not “scientific in any way” and “actually quite ‘amateurish.’”

According to the Alexa web information company, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic. About one month after launch, Cuil’s Product VP and renowned search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello.

Criticism

Since launch, Cuil’s search results tend to display seemingly random images. This was noticed by several bloggers. Even months after its launch, incorrect images appear with some web sites as they did at launch. A Gmail logo is still shown for a blogging site, TechCrunch.

Contact Information

• Type of site  search engine
• Available language(s)  English
• Owner  Cuil, Inc.
• Launched  July 28, 2008

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