Vreel Stage6 Clone further delayed

Vreel, which was shortly named Divxit, is a Stage6 clone that appeared back in April. The frontpage did not reveal a lot of information at first which changed after the name change. A Questions and Answers section was added which tried to answer several of the pressing questions that must have flooded the inboxes of the developers.

Today should have been the day where Vreel goes live but unfortunately though this is not going to happen. The date has changed from May 6th to May 2008 and they have added a temporary forum and added several new questions to the FAQ.

And the information there make me doubt that the service will last long enough to become a serious competitor. In the forum thread “Why aren’t you launched yet” three answers are given why Vreel has not launched yet.

Firstly, our (previous) lead programmer liked to keep us guessing by vanishing for days at a time - making it near impossible to communicate any changes to him. I’m not sure if he’s even aware that we’ve switched to Vreel.net. We’re currently working with a highly regarded coder team, in order to avoid any further delays and disappointment.

So they switched from one coder to a coding team. It does look however make them look relatively amateurish.

Secondly, this thing has literally exploded since we started up - following the green light we got from DivX, we got a huge amount of attention - and a couple of servers based in the US just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Limelight Networks approached us with a contract with thousands of servers all over the world at 1.8TB/s+ connectivity - which we just couldn’t turn down. This does add on a small workload, and will slightly lengthen the testing process - but we shouldn’t be looking at any sort of dramatic time increase here.

That’s an understandable reason. Adding new servers, or a cluster of servers from another network should take a while.

And finally, we’re in the process of speaking with advertisement partners. As any videophile in the world can tell you, streaming HD video eats bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow - and rather than collapse under our own debt within a month, we’d prefer to find a solution which will allow us to run freely, without having to shut down most of our servers, or forcing a paid subscription.

This reason is the one I’m worried about most. They do not have a monetization concept yet which should be one of the first concerns when planning a high definition video portal. The Divx creators were not able to monetize their portal properly and decided to shut it down because of bandwidth and maintenance costs. What makes you think they will succeed where a company with huge ties in the Industry could not ?