DivX: Shut Down of Stage6 Portal Is for the Best

Yesterday DivX (DIVX) announced that it would be shutting down the Stage6 video portal effective this Thursday. DivX originally planned to spin off Stage6 as a separate company late last year, but then announced in December that it was looking for strategic alternatives instead.

I'm never pleased to see any service or video portal have to close but this is the best thing DivX could be doing. Operating a portal was not their core business and the last thing we need right now as an industry, or as consumers, is more video portals. Stage6 never got any real traction in the industry, was not a service I heard others discussing and had very little in the way of usage by content owners.

From the get go the service was destined to fail as DivX was using the site to showcase their own technology. The problem being that if the only way you can try to showcase adoption of your technology by content owners is by running your own website, it won't work.

The shut down notice on the Stage6 website says the service was started "with the mission of empowering content creators and viewers to discover a new kind of video experience." I'm not sure what that "new kind of video experience" was they are referencing but I think too many companies in the industry think that just because they encode video at high bit rates or large window sizes, they will be successful. You have to do more today than just deliver video that looks good, you have to have a business model behind it and there needs to be a demand for the service.

A high-quality, high-bit rate, large window sized video content offering does not equal success by itself.

Comments

[hattryx:]

did they ever try to monetize it? no ads, no sponsored content. i found the quality of their content dangerously close to television

2008 Feb 26 08:20 AM

[jdavid:]

it was said "From the get go the service was destined to fail as DivX was using the site to showcase their own technology. The problem being that if the only way you can try to showcase adoption of your technology by content owners is by running your own website, it won't work. "

Why would they run a website that did NOT showcase their own tech? There is no place to see Divx other than this one, showing how it makes the Flash videos of YouTube look sick is a bad business idea?

I think one big problem is they ended up hosting pornography and did not want to have to vet all the uploads.

2008 Feb 26 08:27 AM

[Charbax:]

You are so wrong. Stage6 had huge traffic, over 400 million hits per month, over 1 million dollars per month in bandwidth costs, Stage6 had the same bandwidth cost as Youtube had when they were bought by Google.

I just expect DivX will keep a safe backup of all the DVD and HD quality content that Stage6 users have uploaded during the past years, cause I am sure that content can be monetized.

And DivX should have implemented analogic fingerprinting filtering mechanism to filter out pirated content.

2008 Feb 26 07:49 PM

[John Yossarian:]

I think a more fundamental point is that stage6 sort-of worked the way we all imagine the internet SHOULD work. It allowed for very high-quality videos to be uploaded - videos which were worth watching i might add, not simply homages to World of Warcraft or people punching strangers - without all the hideous and tedious back-biting and boasting which ruins youtube.

Furthermore, i think that high-quality, high-bit rate, large window sized video content offerings should absolutely spell success on their own. Superior video content should be inherently successful in the online video market; as a user i couldn't give a shit about business strategy.

Still, i can't help wandering why they weren't bought ou in the 7 months they were looking for it...

2008 Feb 27 04:13 PM

[sanjuro:]

Hmm. Stage 6 was a bloody amazing site that deserves to live on. it surely didn't fail or disappoint the people who used it. What's puzzling is why it is closing now. There's an interesting article on techcrunch on what happened within the DivX board that may have caused the closure announcement. I hope it's not to late to "rescue" the site.

2008 Feb 27 07:55 PM

[myoriginalname:]

Well Dan Rayburn, indeed, you are really pleased to announce the shutdown of stage6. It seems that the only ones who really feel sorry about this bad news are us, the users of it, condemned to use bad-quality video services like youtube.

2008 Feb 28 11:02 AM

[delacroixP:]

I'm waiting for StageH264 !

I never did see the value of up/downloading/streami... content in Mpeg4 when H264 could potentially reduce the bandwidth and storage costs by 30%.

2008 Feb 28 11:45 AM

[sob:]

totally agree with you, and maybe its for the best if h264 is the future of divx. A similar technology already uses h264 decompression in a light weighted plugin called streamplug and the accompagning service ,messagefromme.
i am sure other hq sites will fill in the left space, and oh btw, (1 march ) stage6 is now linking veoh on their home page, displaying a shiny 'go to veoh now' tab. ...sob

2008 Feb 29 10:32 PM

[User 159419:]

Definitely a bad move by DivX Inc. Tested the new service spin off, definitely off, additional software required, reading through the software agreement was scary, to sum it up, the service has the right to reach the content downloaded from the service and delete if they see fit, pretty "Big Brother" if you ask me! To top it off download performance is gone. To think I was actually looking to buy Stock in the company! Definitely will be watching to see how they recover from this.

2008 Mar 03 02:18 AM

[atltom58:]

Well I for one am still amazed that they just shut down one of the first vid collection sites such as this that was actually worth the time of downloading the software for it. Im a big documentary fan and after discovering the high quality full length episodes (not in 10 min sections like you tube) i pretty much just used my tv to watch dvds and my computer to watch history channal type shows. Surely someone will pick up this gem and turn it into what sites like youtube
can only dream about.

2008 Mar 05 02:13 AM