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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."
...when I say that we'll miss you stage6. You provided us with an alternative to the much lower quality videos on youtube and many other like sites. Great job divx.
The bandwidth costs are killing them and they're not making enough money from their content partners & advertising.
The real bread & butter of Divx is licensing the codec.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For a long time stage6 had better video than most other sites because they were one of the few not using flash as a video player. But now h264 video support is part of flash I see a load of sites doing high quality video that leaves stage6 looking kinda ho hum in comparison.
Use a h.264 codec to encode it, like x264. It's usually a little smaller with less artifacts.
That's because DivX and XviD both sprang from the open source Project Mayo. They used the "assign your copyright to us when you contribute" scheme that MySQL uses. Then suddenly the project was shut down, and all the Project Mayo code suddenly became the closed source DivX project. XviD was created by the pissed off Project Mayo contributers.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
Maybe if everyone clicks like mad on their ads during those two days left, they'll earn millions, save the site, and everyone will live happily ever after. No ?
stage6 was by far the best video site out there in terms of video quality and the ability to watch things full screen.
It seems stupid to me that they couldn't make their business model work. They had excellent technology, but obviously like so many online ventures they didn't think very hard about how they were going to make money.
It seems obvious to me that they could have gotten significant cash on advertising if they did speach to text translation on the videos and then did some context based ads on that text. However, they seemed to have almost no advertising on their site, and thus no way to recoup losses.
Additionally, they could have tried a model that required users to subscribe to stage6 as basically an internet television service. However, they seemed like they weren't really willing to try *anything* to recoup expenses, and just killed the project by inaction.
This worries me because the same problems basically face youtube, and similarly google has done pretty much nothing to make the site profitable since purchasing it. The only real change has been the removal of copyrighted material from the site, and that can hardly be called an improvement.
Hopefully divx will license out the stage6 browser plugin and serving infrastructure to other companies so the technology won't die.
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
The decision to shut Stage6 down may have something to do with sites like quicksilverscreen.com using it to host full movies. They might not be able to fix the hole that makes such hosting possible, and they probably don't want to deal with the liability.
XviD shits on DivX. Project Mayo forever.
Scumbags.
Is everybody paying attention? That's how you troll, kids.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.