After the demise of Stage 6 and the disappearance of its unofficial successor Vreel it became apparent that it is difficulty to run a profitable video streaming portal. Veoh seems to be the next company that is realizing that providing a service to a worldwide audience can have a negative impact on bandwidth costs and advertising revenues. This might have been the reason why they decided to block access to Veoh to all but 33 countries.
NewTeeVee has a list of countries that are blocked currently taken from the Wikipedia entry. If you do the math you notice that many countries are still missing on that list. If you sum it up you could say that access is blocked for most countries in Africa, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and Asia.
The first reason that was given to the public was that access was blocked due to a low concentration of users in those countries. According to official sources all blocked countries accounted for 10% of the Veoh user base. It probably makes sense from a business point of view to concentrate on markets that provide a large enough user base to be attractive to advertisers but the way the news was transmitted to the user base was rather unprofessional.
I suppose you could still try and access Veoh using a virtual private network connection like Hotspot Shield if you really wanted to.
Update on Vreel: (received via email)
The vreel servers were hosted in Houston’s DC1 datacenter, owned by the planet – which caught fire on saturday :)
Following a flurry of failed repairs, theplanet has finally agreed under immense pressure to move our servers to another datacenter.
We should be back up shortly, and are about ready to enter open beta.
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Well they only lost 10% of their viewers and saved tons of bandwidth. I wonder why hulu, veoh and ect aren’t blocking hotspot shield yet..