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 ?

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The domain name was quickly switched from Divxit to Vreel and the logo was exchanged as well. A disclaimer at Vreel is stating that Vreel has no official affiliation with the DivX corperation. They surely have come to an agreement because Vreel is actively linking to and thanking Divx for their cooperation. A newly added Questions and Answers section gives us additional details about the new video portal.

Vreel will not take over the videos that have been posted at the former Stage6 video portal and start from scratch on launch date which has been delayed until May 6th. The service will be free just like the service at Stage6 was. Users will be able to view videos without an account. Registered users will be able to upload videos with a size of up to 800 Megabytes. The first days will function as a stress test of the server infrastructure.

There is no word on the piracy issue yet but it is very likely that Vreel will run into similar problems as Stage6.

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The videos on Stage6 have a far better quality than everything that you can find at Youtube for instance. It became apparently that popular that the company did not have the resources to continue the portal on their own. Unfortunately they did not succeed in finding a buyer for the portal which left them only with the option to shut it down completely.

The major problem for the users was that they had to install a plugin so that they could play the videos at Stage6. Not a huge problem but it could have turned many away from the service.

I’m really wondering why a company like Microsoft would not take advantage of such a great video portal and make a bid for it. It’s a sad thing to see this portal being shut down. My advice, head over there now and watch / download all the nice stuff that you can find there. Lots of nice documentaries, music videos in high quality and the like.

It’s really worth it. The portal will shut down on February 29th 2008.

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