In response to questions from CNET News.com, Angela Gyetvan, Revver's vice president of marketing, said: "I'm not at liberty to discuss any of this with you. I can't comment."

Mark Elfenbein, LiveUniverse's chief operating officer also declined to comment.

Revver gained some notoriety in 2006 when video-sharing became a worldwide craze. YouTube dominated the sector but Revver tried carving out a niche by catering to videographers.

The company, backed by such investors as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, and William Randolph Hearst III, offered to share advertising revenue with makers of the most popular clips. The thinking at the company was that if Revver could win over the best creators, audiences would follow.

Famous in the early 1990s for his hit song "U Can't Touch This" and very baggy trousers, Hammer is launching a website that hopes to rival YouTube.

Due to debut later this month, DanceJam will allow users to share and watch their own dance videos.

If the website is a hit, it could help Hammer's finances - he went bankrupt in 1996 with debts of almost $14m (£7m).

Metacafe's headquarters are in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto, California. The company employs 40 people.

Metacafe is one of the largest video-sharing sites on the Web. Every month about 17 million users enter the site and watch more the 450 million video clips uploaded by the users themselves. The Tel Aviv-based company is considered a direct competitor of YouTube, which was sold to Google for USD 1.65 billion.

Welcome fans and filmmakers to Ziddio - a new online and ON DEMAND channel from Comcast featuring user-generated content. Ziddio.com is a place where you can create, watch and share videos with a few key differences we know you'll like.

The content you'll find on Ziddio is mostly created through a variety of contests. Our contests aren't random: we partner with great brands that are recognized and loved around the world. So in one contest, you might be asked to create an application to the Jedi Council from HBO and in the next, you might be showing off your messy home to the Clean House crew from the Style Network.

All videos are rated by Ziddio users. By rating, sending the video to a friend or simply posting a comment, you are giving the best videos the recognition they deserve. Your participation also serves another purpose. Videos with a high rating can win prizes. Depending on the contest you might win a zero gravity flight or a home makeover. Not too shabby, huh?

The move by the United Talent Agency - best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and television producers like Dick Wolf and David Chase - amounts to a bet, albeit a modest one, that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago. It is also a return by Hollywood’s core talent representatives to the sort of new-media business they tested, without great success, at the peak of the dot-com boom.

The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need — just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.

Already, the three agents have cut six-figure deals with major media portals and signed a handful of clients whose Web-based serials, recurring comedy features and short digital films have drawn one-time downloads in the millions and regular watchers, in some cases, in the tens of thousands.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Weinstein said, one of his new agents showed him a Web video that had been up for less than an hour: "Paxilback," a parody of a Justin Timberlake music video, "Sexyback." The agents quickly reached out to its creators, a group of Los Angeles artists called People Food. By the time they could arrange a meeting five days later, the video had been seen 600,000 times.

We are experiencing a temporary site outage due to a database-related issue," Supan confirmed in an e-mail to Reuters. "The site has been down since 7:30am (California time/ 14:30 GMT) today and our engineering team expect it to be up and running in the next few hours."

"To clarify and ensure accuracy, the site is not down for maintenance, the team put up that page mistakenly (it is an old page). "This was an unplanned outage," Supan said.

Around 1:30 p.m. PDT (20:30 GMT) on Tuesday, public access to the YouTube site was restored.

Yes, I can see how people can jump up and say "Wow… thats BAD!" But come on… is it really all that bad? Don't get me wrong... I get pissed too when my server is down... but, lets really think about this: When was the last time your electricity went out? Some more than others… but for me, my electric has gone out over 10 times in the last year. Each time has lasted longer than 3 hours.

"We're currently putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins. We'll be back later. In the meantime, please enjoy a layman's explanation of our website."

Analysts will want to know whether Eefoof can sustain itself by cutting videographers in on revenues. But at a time when many video-sharing sites are looking for compelling content, the payment offer could give Eefoof an edge in attracting superior videos.

Eefoof's offer goes like this: Once a month the company tallies the number of page views for each submission. The company then looks at overall traffic and calculates what percentage of the page views was generated by each submission. Ad revenue is divided accordingly.

"Once your account exceeds $25, we will send you a PayPal transfer," the company wrote on its site. Specific percentages weren't dislosed on the Eefoof Web site. Representatives from Eefoof could not be reached for comment on Monday.

The company employs more than 50 people and the site and the desktop application combined result in 280 million video streams per month. Unlike YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video, Yahoo Video, Uncut Video, MotionBox and other long-tail sites, Metacafe applies algorithmic filters to pick out the top videos - only a small number appear on the site each day.

This is right on the heels of the launch of AIM Pages, which is directly targeting Myspace and other social networks.

Look for a launch in the next week.

I am seeing an increasing trend of the big guys simply copying what successful startups are doing. AOL with this product and AIM Spaces. Google with Google Notepad and a flurry of other projects, etc. The only large company that is even experimenting with unproven concepts at this point is Microsoft with its various Live.com ideas. I'd like to see more experimenting at the big company level.