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DivX Pulls Plug on Stage6

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the your-users-are-asking-for-ways-to-pay-you dept.

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."

10 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. I think I speak for everyone... by pwnies · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.

    1. Re:I think I speak for everyone... by ChaosWeevil · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:I think I speak for everyone... by springbox · · Score: 4, Informative

      All you had to do was copy the URL to the .divx file from the page, download the file, change the extension to .avi and enjoy.

    3. Re:I think I speak for everyone... by haruchai · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, renaming the extension wasn't necessary if you used VLC
        as your media player

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  2. Translation: by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources In other words...
    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!
    1. Re:Translation: by pinkocommie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. DivX lost the advantage when h264 came along by szyzyg · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:What now for DivX by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  5. nooo by sentientbrendan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. MOD PARENT AWESOME by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!