Stage6: The Beginning of the End for Streaming Video
Written by J.J. King on March 08, 2008So DivX Corporation’s Stage6 has croaked. The service’s ‘goodbye, cruel word’ note says it was a victim of its own success, but that it proved ‘it’s possible to distribute true high definition video on the Internet’. What it really showed is how deliriously inefficient streaming video is, whether it’s high def or otherwise.
It cost at least $1m a month to run Stage6 with its 17.4 million unique users a month, whereas (at an informed guess) The Pirate Bay costs about $50,000 a month all-in for its 92.5 million. That’s $57,000 per million users for Stage6; $540 per million for The Pirate Bay (not including people using its tracker without visiting the site, which adds a lot of Mininova’s traffic as well, not to mention the other big indexes.) So at the very least, The Pirate Bay is a hundred and five times more efficient than Stage6 was.
But inefficiency is not the only reason the service is no more, while the vilified Pirate Bay, Mininova et al. are still with us. Stage6 was also a lot more illegal than a BitTorrent tracker — whether it pretended to be complying with the DMCA or not. Surprisingly under reported after the abrupt demise of the service was the 6th Feb US court ruling against DivX’s attempt to establish its protection under the DMCA’s safe harbour provisions ahead of a legal battle with Universal Music Group. My reading of the company’s consequent, speedy exit from the stage (and correct me if you think I’m wrong) is that Stage6 didn’t have the cash or confidence to test its luck any further. (How much this affects DivX as a whole remains to be seen. But only six days after the court decision, Jerome Vashisht Rota, the inventor of DivX and a major shareholder in DivX corporation, was openly dumping stock.)
It’s not hard to read the tea leaves. While GooTube (famously being sued by Viacom on pretty much the same grounds) probably won’t lose sleep, smaller players eating their lunches off of pirate content will be paying very close attention. VCs burning money on pushing streaming media to the masses will at least want to imagine some returns on their investment rather than the further expense of executives in the dock.
So why is the exit of Stage6 a step in the right direction? Because for all the hyperbole in the mainstream (and sometimes online) media about the YouTube or Google Video or Stage6 ‘revolution‘, the relationship to media they offer us is far too traditional. Come to this place. Be served your media (and suck down your advertising along with it). Go away again. Yes, we can upload material, but I’m not the only one who feels that this wasn’t the primary function of Stage6, even if it did distribute about 50,000 copies of STEAL THIS FILM II before its demise. No need to share, no need to understand the technology, no need to think. It’s what they called ‘lean back’ media: millions of people slouching thoughtlessly in front of an marketing-emitting portal.
The promise of P2P is a thorough breakdown of the kind of power that congeals in a portal like Stage6. A user-owned, user-operated infrastructure that doesn’t require massive investment, doesn’t by default allow oligarchs to make more money from us. A disruptive, mutable infrastructure that brings media to us in the context we choose, forcing a massive re-think about what, why and how we create — as individuals, as businesses, as a society.
It is lazy for us to rely at all on portals like Stage6, but worse than lazy, it’s dangerous. It suggests we don’t value the potential autonomy P2P offers us. Our old media masters profited from control of content: are we really so happy to swap them for new ones who profit from control of our eyeballs? However lazy we are, I think that most of us are able to see that that this isn’t a model that we want to encourage. The demise of Stage6 and the portals that will follow gives us cause to think about strengthening our infrastructures: and that can’t be a bad thing.
Previously: Diferior, an Easy to Use BitTorrent CMS
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62 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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was only into stage6 for 2 months b4 it shut down but they were the kings of HIGH QUALITY (even HD) video and at fast downloads!!!
where else on the net can you find HIGH QUALITY video? youtube sucks in that department hands down.
Stage6 was awesome, definitely gonna miss it!
I couldn’t agree more with this article. Streaming is at best useful for live content but I’m not interested in live content (sports?) anyway. Very often popular content can be downloaded faster than realtime playback time as long as it’s still hot. So who cares about waiting 10-15 minutes if that actually guarantees 100% quality and no loss of sync. Streaming actually requires that you have very good internet connection and constant high throughput whereas downloading works even with the slowest access. Even better you can downloaded hours and days of entertainment in the background without utilizing all of your bandwidth.
Regarding the people who cannot find high quality content, I really have to wonder whether you realize what “TorrentFreak” is about. It’s really not that hard and no it’s not GooTube.
hmmm… considering the splash of Google Ads down the side of the page, it seems rich to slam a company for trying to recoup costs while providing free streaming video. Add to that the fact that from the very beginning you start by telling us how much it costs to run such a service.
BT is great for movies, but half of what is available are bogus fakes and crappy cam versions (who the fuck watches cams anyway?)
yay stage6 is finaly dead!
>24
Old movies are public domain and you can find them on archive.org
>29
Learn to scene/torrent correctly and you wont be downloading them bogus fakes.
it’s very simple why it is happening…people with firewalls or people who are too stupid and nervous to join the torrent craze use stage 6 because it is instant, rather than waiting for download time and they feel that they wont be tracked down…its about people who don’t understand torrents at all
cunts
:)
:tear: :cry: :weep:
No matter what you say, Stage6 was good. It was better than good. It offered great high quality divx video for free. No where else on the internet could you find HD streaming, except here.
[quote comment="307240"][quote comment="307116"]hmm…BT based streaming[/quote]
It’s called Vuze.[/quote]
Vuze is not streaming, it is download.
People are calling Stage6 a nightmare. Why? You don’t have to use it. Even BT based applications like Joost do not offer HD streaming, and nothing else compared. Admittedly the search was terrible, but we had http://www.tv-links.cc/ for tv shows and google for everthing else.
However, despite all that Stage6 achieved, it was doom to fail. The average file size was 255mb (divx) (compared to 7.4mb for youtube (flv)). No one can stream HD using a centralised server system cheaply, bittorrent was good for that, but since they were willing to pay this huge sum of money per month, the streaming is almost as good as bittorrent.
In memoriam, Stage6.
Stage6 allowed fast downloads (30 minutes or less) of the newest films at the cinema. These films were posted up by other people who weren’t going to say anything for you taking their films. It may be inefficient for the people running it, but had a very good service for the people using it. P2P will last the time compared to a portal, but the article posted obviously shows the bias of the author and his naive way of thinking. stage6 will surely be missed.
Hey Ruby, don’t think your that clever because you know how do download torrents and understand them - they aren’t hard. Most people used stage6 as well as torrents. But with stage6 you could preview the film while it was streaming, and then right click and save as if you liked the film. Most films new at the cinema were available as well, just like torrents. What was not to like?
Old news….but good article.
Hmm, never did like official ‘DivX’ as I got the impression the people behind the idea were just attempting to cash in on the old div3 haxored asf codec scene, which was already known as DivX. Seemed to me these folks just wanted to monetise the ‘DivX’ codec success.
Maybe I’ve got it all wrong? Can’t say I’ll lose any sleep over their demise if it’s on the cards.
[quote]I don’t know what the hell you’re all talking about -stage 6! All I know is I download flash video from youtube. Small video file size though there’s very few movies or serials and they’re all broken up into 10 min segments. Where do we get real quality movie xvid video? Don’t see much on torrents either except fakes. Call me dumb but I don’t know anything about hashing and how would I be expected to when I haven’t seen any explanation anywhere? People don’t just KNOW these things.[/quote]
You suck
I liked Stage 6, but thanks to the speed of internet growth, the hole it left will be filled and over-flowed with alternates soon enough. (and already has been, depending on your definition)
I don’t agree that streaming video is dying or needs to. The concept of instantly previewing a film is great in my opinion.
I might love bit torrent for multiple files, massive files, or an extremely popular file. But not a quick little clip. Or a trailer.
I used Stage6 occasionally. The streaming DivX player didn’t work for me because I’me still using Windows 98SE and it required 2K/NT/XP. I could easily download the videos though. I managed to grab both seasons of an Australian show that I had never seen the end of. Unfortunately most TV seasons were incomplete, with several missing episodes.
Something I’ve never seen anyone else mention; Stage6 used a 7-digit number to identify files. This means that the site was limited to 9,999,999 videos total. That might sound like a lot, but for a video sharing site, it really isn’t.
[quote comment="307238"]Call me dumb but I don’t know anything…[/quote]
Being stupid is no excuse for continued stupidity. Learn to use a search engine, jackass.
I have to say this is the first time I have disagreed with an article on this site.
[quote comment="307445"]I couldn’t agree more with this article. Streaming is at best useful for live content but I’m not interested in live content (sports?) anyway. Very often popular content can be downloaded faster than realtime playback time as long as it’s still hot. So who cares about waiting 10-15 minutes if that actually guarantees 100% quality and no loss of sync. Streaming actually requires that you have very good internet connection and constant high throughput whereas downloading works even with the slowest access. Even better you can downloaded hours and days of entertainment in the background without utilizing all of your bandwidth.
Regarding the people who cannot find high quality content, I really have to wonder whether you realize what “TorrentFreak” is about. It’s really not that hard and no it’s not GooTube.[/quote]
actually, LOLZ!!!
Good one, guy!
I’ve never heard of Stage6 before. But it seems that copyright cancer brought them down. As always. And it was their own choice. They could set up a free and open BT tracker/forum for HD Video sharing and support the community. But I suppose they wanted to profit directly from streaming video in the end. In this case - good riddance.
[quote comment="307115"]Adverts are the easiest way “free” content can be profitable. So long as they are not annoying I see no harm in adverts.[/quote]
Advertisement = annoying. Always. By definition.
With HQ sites like this gone I’ve had to search and find sites like http://messagefromme.com/
“the relationship to media they offer us is far too traditional. Come to this place. Be served your media (and suck down your advertising along with it). Go away again. ”
Rather like tpb and many other torrent sites imo.
We come to a torrent site and do a search.
We sometimes click download but most of the time we click another link that takes us onto a page with more info about the torrent.
I’m all for supporting torrent sites and everything, but they also serve ads and for the most part there ads for legal ulternatives to the thing i’m downloading, which makes them stupid.
“No need to share, no need to understand the technology, no need to think. ”
The average home user doesn’t understand torrents iether though.
Its torrents that bought piracy to the casual home computer user, it did this by making it easier than having to get onto a ftp and upload stuff that the normal user wouldn’t have.
As a hole, i’d say that torrents have done to piracy everything in the above quoatation, except perhaps sharing, but i bet most of the kids that are going to be the pirates of the future don’t give seeding a second thought.
I don’t look at the ads iether, i came to watch a video so thats what I do.
Still a interesting read though.
who next , veoh ? since they provide a program call veohtv that enable users easily to download copyrighted stuff .
how exactly is TV supposed to be paid for if you dont have adverts? do you wanna pay a £50/month ($100/month) subscription for the basic channels? how about a show by show charge? or why not just swap your face for an episode…
either come up with a decent alternative or get out…
Gallus
“So whats all this about BBC’s iPlayer?”
a total cop out; considering the potential.
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