Palo Alto, California - (The Hosting News) - April 28, 2006 - Visual content hosting and publishing service, Photobucket, has launched its Photobucket Video. According to the company, it is the fastest, easiest way to upload and publish videos online.

Photobucket offers consumers an easy way to upload once, and share their photos and videos across multiple sites from a central location using simple linking. Inexpensive digital photo and video cameras are now widespread, but users are often challenged when it comes to moving their personal photos and videos online, to commerce and social networking web sites like eBay, MySpace, and to personal blogs.

According to Photobucket, it currently serves over 63 percent of all links to social networking web sites, distributing more than 50 billion image requests per month, around 2 percent of all US Internet traffic. Photobucket has nearly 15 million registered members, and is growing at a rate of over 65,000 new members per day. Photobucket members are currently adding over 4 million new images daily (45 new images per second).

Alex Welch, Chief Executive Officer of Photobucket commented, ''The volume of personal photos, art, and video continues to skyrocket, but sharing that content online is often confusing and complicated. Since day one, our members have told us they want an easy way to express themselves visually on a variety of web sites. We make it easy for our members to upload and store their original images, graphic art, and videos, then link that content anywhere on the Internet.''

Photobucket's founders have built large scale hosting and telecommunications infrastructures. Photobucket is designed to store and deliver exceptionally high volumes of images and videos at an unparalleled speed and reliability, without the lags, chop, and delays that can disrupt the visual experience. At peak times, Photobucket serves over 30,000 images and videos per second.

Most consumers do not own web servers for storage and publishing. They also don't want to upload their videos and photos multiple times to different web sites. Photobucket gives users 1 GB of storage for free, and up to 5 GB with a premium account; this storage is equivalent to around 50,000 images or 5,000 3 to 5 minute videos.

Paul Remer, CEO of Piczo commented, ''Our members use Photobucket to enhance their online experience. By integrating with Photobucket's Plugin, we have given our users the ability to easily access their Photobucket content within Piczo itself. Photobucket's plug-in improves our members' experience on Piczo by allowing them to spend more time designing their personal web sites.''

James Cao, Founder of Gaiaonline added, ''Photobucket's image and video hosting service is very popular with our members. By hosting our members' images and videos, Photobucket allows us to focus on building a vibrant community. Photobucket is a great partner for us and for our members.''

Photobucket Video endeavors to offer the fastest and easiest way to upload and share video over the Internet. Members upload videos in any standard video format (mpeg, avi, etc.), and Photobucket performs a real-time conversion to a flash format that users can then publish and share immediately. Flash is supported by virtually every browser, and displays video inside the context of the web page. As a result, Photobucket video can be viewed quickly and easily, without launching a separate video player.

Photobucket provides images, graphic art, and videos can be directly linked from Photobucket to any site, including popular sites like eBay, Gaiaonline, Piczo, Blogger, LiveJournal, Friendster, and Myspace.

Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch (CEO) and Darren Crystal (CTO). Two years later, Photobucket was named the fastest growing site of 2005 according to Nielsen/Netratings and now ranks as a Top 100 site by reach according to all of the major ranking services.

Photobucket was profitable last year and has been funded primarily by earnings. As of March 2006, Photobucket had nearly 15 Million users growing by over 65,000 users per day. Photobucket serves over 50 Billion images per month. Photobucket is based in downtown Palo Alto, California with technology operations and development based in Denver, Colorado.

To learn more, please visit: www.photobucket.com.
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