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DivX Pulls Plug on Stage6
Xelios writes "DivX announced today that it will be shutting down Stage6, its high-quality video sharing site. 'So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day its really as simple as that.' The news comes after the former CEO of DivX stepped down last year to head Stage6, which was to become a separate company, and the still ongoing legal battle with UMG."
I rather disagree. Stage6 was indeed high quality, which was nice, but the plugin required for it was hideous. It caused my browser to crash many, many times, and half the time it didn't work, providing the message "Could not download video file." I'm a rather glad to see it go, if only because I won't have to deal the plugin anymore.
Use a h.264 codec to encode it, like x264. It's usually a little smaller with less artifacts.
Or they never even tried to compete? Most people didn't even know it existed, there was no marketing push only of late have I noticed the embed url's to link to the videos directly etc. Far more importantly though they didn't try to offset costs. I'm sure they could've come up with a P2P based variant wherein users could have active clients helping them distribute the load with them providing heavy bandwidth sources reducing their costs pretty dramatically.
I'd say they lost the advantage when they closed the source and betrayed us all, and then when XVID came along, it became pretty darn undesirable. h264 is just the next step.
Well it might be bad form to blow my own horn, but you did ask - imeem.com is doing h264 video compare the indiana jones trailer on imeem versus the same video on youtube
(be sure to hit the full screen button for best effect, and make sure your flash player is a recent one).
imeem is better known as a place to upload and share mp3s, but the video support is pretty good too.
Stage6 was quite popular due to availability of many TV shows but they've started to seriously fight it 2 or 3 months ago. It was THE place to get many british sitcoms. I wonder if this has anything to do with the shutdown.
As a long time Anime watcher, I've tried loads of streaming media websites but nothing beats the quality of stage6. I used to watch episodes on youtube, crunchyroll etc. in the worst quality possible until a stage6 turned up in a random search.. Now i only go to another website if stage6 doesn't have what I want. .. Does anyone know if they are taking donations to stay alive? Heck, I wouldn't mind even if they started charging a monthly fee for viewers.
I was very sad when they announced the site's going to die on thursday. I looked for 'make a donation' or some similar link to send them money
I don't know if anyone else found this, but when I installed the divx web player on my Vista machine, it killed Explorer, causing a constant cycle of 'explorer has stopped responding and will be restarted'.
I ended up having to re-install, and lost lots of data because I couldn't even get it to copy things off the machine.