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."

DivX lost the advantage when h264 came along

[szyzyg]

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.

Re:I think I speak for everyone...

[springbox]

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.

Re:What now for DivX

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:I think I speak for everyone...

[orkysoft]

Huh? I never heard of the site before, but I tested it today, and the videos load just fine with mplayer-plugin, which is a rather general plugin for playing all kinds of media files. No need for specialized plugins.

The video quality is quite nice, actually. A lot better than Youtube's.

nooo

[sentientbrendan]

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.

Re:DivX lost the advantage when h264 came along

[ralphthemagician]

No. There aren't currently any major sites using H.264 encoded video to stream to a Flash front-end. Flash Media Server still hasn't been updated to support H.264 yet. What people forget is that there are a few codecs that Flash actually supports. YouTube uses the ancient VP3, as to many others, to avoid licensing costs since the codec is now open source. VP6 has existed for a while, and is actually a fantastic codec for the bit rates it's used at. It's nearly as good as H.264 in practice. Stage6 had better quality video than YouTube, but it did not have better quality video than what Flash was actually capable of playing. Try it yourself if you have Flash 8 or CS3. Convert a video to VP6 and you can see that it's quite impressive. At reasonable bit rates for streaming media (say 1500Kbps), it's nearly as good as H.264 at the same bitrate, only a little "softer."

Re:DivX lost the advantage when h264 came along

[szyzyg]

"No. There aren't currently any major sites using H.264 encoded video to stream to a Flash front-end."

Sorry, completely wrong, because imeem.com has been doing this for a while now, I know because I was part of the team implementing this, feature. I pointed out the new Indiana Jones Trailer [imeem.com] on imeem which is delivered at a resolution of 768x360 and 800kbit/sec, and when it's played full screen it looks pretty darn nice.

Re:I think I speak for everyone...

[haruchai]

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

Re:I think I speak for everyone...

[smurfsurf]

And there is a download button built-in on every page.