Serving multimedia content over the Internet with negligible delay remains a challenge. With the advent of Web 2.0, numerous video sharing sites using different storage and content delivery models have become popular. Yet, little is known about these models from a global perspective. Such an understanding is important for designing systems which can efficiently serve video content to users all over the world. In this paper, we analyze and compare the underlying distribution frameworks of three video sharing services – YouTube, Dailymotion and Metacafe – based on traces collected from measurements over a period of 23 days.

We investigate the variation in service delay with the user’s geographical location and with video characteristics such as age and popularity. We leverage multiple vantage points distributed around the globe to validate our observations. Our results represent some of the first measurements directed towards analyzing these recently popular services.

The Internet is emerging as a prime broadcast medium offering Television, Radio, Cinema, and the exchange of videos for personal as well as commercial use. With the increasing demand, numerous websites offering a variety of options for sharing user-generated multimedia files have become available. YouTube, Dailymotion, and Metacafe are among the most popular video sharing services on the Internet today; they were the top three video streaming sites in the SeoMOZ Web 2.0 survey 2007 [2].

The new services leverage a video delivery technique known as pseudo-streaming [3]. This differs from traditional web streaming in that the video content can be played back as it is being progressively downloaded. The content, unlike traditional streaming, is delivered using HTTP/TCP through generic Web servers. While there are extensive studies of traditional and live web streaming [4, 5] and their workloads [6, 7], and content distribution using content delivery networks [8, 9] or peer-assisted approaches…

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