gHacks technology news » stage 6 http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:33:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Vreel is live ! http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/20/vreel-is-life/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/20/vreel-is-life/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:11:19 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5050 I was not really sure if we would ever see Vreel, the semi-official successor of Stage 6, go live but apparently the developers did it finally. Vreel’s doors have opened and anyone can join the Open Beta. Vreel, like Stage 6, is based on Divx technology which means that the latest Divx Web Player has to be installed to play the high definition videos of the video portal.

Speed is excellent currently but it remains to be seen how a massive rush of new users will affect the website. Many blogs will soon start to publish articles about the Open Beta of Vreel. Videos are definitely playing in a nice quality, much better than that of Youtube or similar video portals. Vreel offers the usual rating and comments system but it is quite obvious that not all functions are yet available.

A click on the community link for instance is just stating that this will come soon. What you can do right now is view, upload, comment and rate videos which is probably what most users that visit video sites do anyway.

Seems that the first outage hit the service right in the middle of my article. I cannot connect to it anymore and the pages give a page load error currently. Maybe just a server restart, it is a beta after all. Cannot do a screenshot of the interface right now obviously.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/20/vreel-is-life/feed/ 8 Veoh blocks all but 33 countries http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/03/veoh-blocks-all-but-33-countries/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/03/veoh-blocks-all-but-33-countries/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:29:38 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4725 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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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/03/veoh-blocks-all-but-33-countries/feed/ 1 Stage 6 Clone announced http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/24/stage-6-clone-announced/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/24/stage-6-clone-announced/#comments Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:18:26 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=3907 Stage 6 was a highly successful video portal created and maintained by the creators of the DIVX codec to showcase among other things the power and quality of the DIVX codec. This was reached by providing high quality videos on the portal opposed to lower quality videos on other portals like Youtube. The service however never managed to be cost neutral or profitable for the company and they decided to pull it after trying to find different solutions to keep it alive.

Bandwidth and server costs accumulated to more than a million Dollars each month. As I said earlier the service was highly popular because of the great video quality which exceeded that of most other portals.

Tulluis informed me just a minute ago that a Stage 6 Clone was announced that would open its gate on April 29th. The homepage of the new service is Divxit and there is unfortunately not a lot to discover right now. Servers and GUI seem to be online already and the Divxit Core converter nears completion which seems to be the last step before the portal goes live.

It would be really nice to see a comeback of Stage 6. A service like that needs either a very potent company in the background or find a way to monetize the website properly so that it does not have to be closed soon after release. Monetization of video portals is not easy because companies know that the click through rates are horrible.

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