Stage6 Resurrected?
April 25, 2008
Davis Freeberg has a piece out discussing the apparent return of Stage6, or at least a potential clone. Vreel.net (previously DivxIT) is said to be ready to launch a site that it hopes will recapture the spirit, if not the user base, of the original. It also seems to have the blessing of DivX to use its webplayer and codec.
Davis did a nice bit of investigative work here. Some in the blogosphere have commented that it won’t fly, since Veoh (originally endorsed by DivX when Stage6 folded) is where all the old Stage6 users went. But if you look at recent Alexa stats, there’s no uptick in Veoh traffic that corresponds with the dramatic drop in Stage6 as it went off the air. So they’re still out in the Ether somewhere.
I hope Vreel (or someone) succeeds, but I have my doubts. The ties between Stage6 and DivX’s software, community, forums, and tech people had a lot to do with its original success, as well as Jordan Greenhall’s vision. Further, there seems to be no paid subscriptions and therefore no business model (yet). Presumably an ad-based model can be added later, but in the meantime it’ll be damned expensive if traffic builds to anything like Stage6.
We’ll see.
Disclosure: I hold no position in any of the stocks mentioned here.
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1.
rik | May 5, 2008 at 4:40 am
i bumped into a website a few months ago that is soley based on the divx player, a little diferent from stage6 but still has high quality streams.
after a user uploads his video he is presented with 2 options, watch straight from the site or use the code generated to embed to his own website
2.
rik | May 5, 2008 at 4:41 am
i guess i forgot the url
divxvine.com is the website i mentioned earlier
3.
Scott Berry | May 5, 2008 at 9:19 am
Interesting. Looks to be targeted at least partly to people who want to share videos with friends/family only. Nice way to share large files with friends w/o dealing with email restrictions (but of course there are other ways to do this).
Again, I wonder how these sites expect to pay for all the required transit bandwidth, if they ever get to scale.
Thanks for the pointer.
4.
SetVId | June 2, 2008 at 10:45 pm
There is a working stage6 replacement at http://hostmedia.us.
Fully Streaming divx HD videos