DivX Spins Off Stage6
DivX announced today it would spin off Stage6, its high-quality YouTube alternative. This is bad news for video-sharing sites, showing they’re having trouble holding their weight without the subsidy of venture capital or Google-level resources. Stage6 appears to have been too much to handle for its moderately successful public company parent.
According to a statement from DivX, the move was driven by a desire to decrease operating expenses, as Stage6 requires a lot of capital, especially as it gets more popular. The public company DivX will now resume its focus on higher-margin business of licensing consumer electronics makers to use its codec.
DivX is currently trading at $14.27, down $0.62 today and way down from an all-time high of $31.89 last November. The company only IPOed last September.
“We have two synergistic and fast-growing businesses that have distinctly different financial models,” said DivXco-founder and CEO Jordan Greenhall, who is leaving his position at DivX to run Stage6. “Stage6, which operates more like an entrepreneurial stage company, will require substantial additional financial investment to continue its dramatic traffic growth and realize its full potential.”
Stage6 (which GigaOM had the scoop on when it launched last year) may have shot itself in the foot by differentiating on streaming quality. It’s actually doing pretty well in terms of traffic; the company reports it say 10 million unique visitors in June, up from 4 million in April. But traffic doesn’t pay the bills; it just makes them bigger. Still, splitting off from DivX shouldn’t necessarily have any negative effects on the site or its growth.
A DivX spokesperson declined comment for the meantime, but promised to add more detail later on.
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[...] out the post on [...]
Uh-oh, maybe I am right… « Jason…
— 1:13 PM on July 24, 2007
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[...] HD web video. While some companies, like DivX, have tried to their hand at offering higher resolution web videos, it is still an exotic [...]
NewTeeVee Is Web Video Ready for an HD Upgrade…
— 6:00 AM on July 30, 2007
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[...] wrote last month about DivX spinning off Stage6, its video-sharing site, saying it wanted to reduce [...]
NewTeeVee DivX Buys Video Search Firm «…
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[...] to differentiate by offering higher quality streams, at substantial cost. In fact, DixV had to spin off Stage6 to decrease operating expenses. With that in mind — who doesn’t want to get rid of that [...]
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DivX CEO Looks Beyond Web Video « NewTeeVee
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[...] 100 million video devices around the world, hasn’t had similar success on the web. In fact, after deciding to spin off high-quality video destination site Stage6 to cut costs, DivX would rather be a service provider to [...]
For DivX, Web Video Is No Go - GigaOM
— 9:49 AM on December 23, 2007
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[...] company, DivX felt added pressure to perform, and in July of last year the company said it would spin off Stage6 in a move to decrease operating expenses. The spinoff was supposed to be done by the end of last [...]
DivX to Nix Stage6 « NewTeeVee
— 11:11 AM on February 25, 2008
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Im still amazed that DivX didnt include some sort of p2p technology into thier software for Stage 6 .
There is another stage6 called mystage6.com that has launched similar video sharing site. Wonder how far will they go before having similar traffic issues
I am absolutelty confident that stage6 or mystage6.com will soon be called the pioneer of video sharing and online video portal rather than an alternative to youtube.
Stage6fetch:
http://www.techiedesi.com/discussion/42/stage6-leech-script-get-direct-download-urls-for-stage6-divx-movies.html
A PHP script to download Stage6 movies, even as bulk. It can, * Fetch URL of a given movie playback page * Fetch URLs of latest videos from the homepage of Stage6 * Fetch URLs of videos contained in any page (be it tag view, or search) * Build HTML download page with title, download URL and a small thumbnail of each video.
Keep Stage 6 Alive!
http://stage6.forumer.com
The Stage6 DivX Community Forum is online now for all stage 6 members to stay in touch and keep up to date with whats going on, hopefully we can work together here and keep the community alive and get stage 6 going again. Thanks to all the great uploaders and posters and stage 6 members that are the people that made stage 6 the best site on the net.
Keep in touch here,and please pass the address on to other ex stage6 members you know, stage6 was a massive community and there were lots of online friends and contacts surrounding stage6.
http://stage6.forumer.com
There is a fully functioning stage6 alternative at http://www.hostmedia.us