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.

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.

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 ?

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.