Elvis imitators on YouTube imitators:

• AOL’s Uncut
• MetaCafe
• Vimeo
• Eyespot
• Google Video
• Grouper
• JumpCut
• Revver
• Vsocial
• Buzznet
• DailyMotion
• Bolt
• Yahoo! Video
• Blip.tv

Of course, not all of those are true imitators of YouTube. Some, such as Revver, actually have a business model, and I think Google Video was in beta before YouTube launched, but the King remains the King (with apologies to my friends at Buzznet)

So after putting you through all those miserable videos (you did watch them all, all the way through, right?), here’s the real thing: the King on YouTube.

Yahoo! has the worst video sharing service — it’s bring your own hosting, which means videos are in multiple file formats (rarely Flash), and download speeds are likely to be atrocious. Why bother?

YouTube is the best, but not all services are bad. Some, in fact are quite good, such as MetaCafe. The interface is actually slightly more attractive than YouTube, and it has copied many of the same features. It just doesn’t have the long tail YouTube has. Google Video is a close third. My main gripe about Google is videos tend to be slow to download, and there are not enough of them (that whole long tail thing). AOL ain’t bad. It offers the most navigation options, which sets it apart to some extent. Browsing by tags is interesting. Real Estate agents seem to love the “about me” tag. It almost looks as if DMC or AdFare uploaded a bunch of its videos (or a client did).

In researching this post, I came across a bit of news I had missed last August: Sony bought Grouper for $65 million. Grouper has plenty of what appears to be copyrighted material on its site. As far as I know, Sony isn’t under the legal scrutiny Google is now. I guess because Sony is part of the family.

UPDATE: About 24 hours after posting this … I see a headline reporting that Universal is suing Grouper and Bolt.