Stage6 Shutting Down on 28th of February 2008

I don’t want to ride the wave like others crying out load and saying this is the worst day in my life, but it is sad, it is sad because Stage6 in my opinion was the only REAL logical future pathway towards high quality videos online, REAL high quality, I know there are other web services now that do provide this service, but again in my opinion it is not with the same ease like Stage6 because stage6 uses a format we all knew for a long time which is DivX.

Now they are claiming that they tried to convert it to a private company or to sell it but those plans couldn’t be implemented:

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 it’s really as simple as that.

Now, why didn’t we think of that before we decided to create Stage6 in the first place, you may ask? That’s a good question. When we first created Stage6, there was a clear need for a service that would offer a true high quality video experience online because other video destinations on the Internet simply weren’t providing that to users. A gap existed, and Stage6 arrived to fill it.

In simple words, the costs are just too much to handle, especially when other services are there providing high quality video streaming. I guess the people who got screwed the most are those sites which were built totally depending on Stage6 videos embedded on their pages, those are going to face big problems and they will need to switch to other services. The funny/sad/crazy thing is that Stage6 is giving only 3 day notice to access the videos on the site!!

Most people are moving now towards Google Video and Veoh, I think Youtube have already announced that they are going to launch a new service for high quality videos, I guess people might jump to that also. But again the kind of ease and quality that Stage6 has I still cant see it anywhere else, who knows maybe a new service might come up and cleverly fill this gap which will be created by the shutdown of Stage6.

Comments February 26th, 2008