DivX Pulls Plug on Stage6

The video site whose popularity has skyrocketed in the past two years only has two more days to live, so if you want to check it out or just enjoy the high definition in which its clips came in, you'd better hurry. Uploads have already been ceased and DivX is hurrying to kill it dead as soon as possible. The site gives a motivation for the decision: "So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide."

With video quality incomparable to YouTube, it had a similar user-uploading policy towards building its database. And I did say 'had' because uploading has already been shut down, and that is the first hint at the real reason Stage6 will soon be going offline: pirates taking over. The DivX team has already received numerous complaints about the content being shared on the site and couldn't handle it anymore. Truth be told, it did take down some of the copyrighted material, but the rate at which it was brought back up was unnerving.

For those not familiar with the site, all I can say is that you missed out on a very good service. Hardly have I seen buffering going from 0 to 100 in a matter of seconds, no matter how large the video was. Moreover, the videos were downloadable by default, unlike Google's video sharing service.

According to comScore, Stage6 has 17.4 million unique monthly users and some 360 million page views. Alexa has the site ranked no. 83 worldwide and no. 53 in the United States, so if they were to sell, they would get a really nice price for it.