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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 …