Stage6

» see stage6.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

stage6 launched as a public beta in june 2006. it was an in-house project of divx, inc., the san diego company that owned the divx codec. the pitch was simple. youtube was running on a flash-video pipeline that capped quality at roughly 320p. people who wanted to watch a real movie at home were not going to settle for that. divx already shipped a browser plugin (the divx web player) that could decode high-bitrate video at full resolution. stage6 wired the upload-and-watch flow on top of that plugin. you uploaded a divx-encoded file at any resolution up to 1080p and it streamed back to anyone with the plugin installed.

the result was a brief and strange corner of the early streaming web. for about twenty months, stage6 was the only mainstream site where you could watch someone's full hd transfer of a tv episode in a browser window. by january 2008 the site had logged roughly 10.7 million lifetime views. a community of release groups and hobby uploaders treated it as a public-facing alternative to the private divx scene that had been running since 1999. the divx web player handled the buffering on a much larger payload than youtube's, but for a fast connection it actually worked.

i knew divx the codec. through the kazaa and dc++ era in turkey 2003 to 2008, divx was the format every movie was encoded in before x264 took over. stage6 the website was a different story. by 2007 youtube had won the casual side of the market and the audience that wanted hd video was already getting it from torrents at home rather than streaming it through a browser plugin. i knew the codec intimately and barely used the site.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it became ~

the financial problem was the bitrate. youtube paid bandwidth on roughly 320p flash streams. stage6 paid bandwidth on full-bitrate divx files of arbitrary length. the math could not converge. the parent company disclosed later that the operating cost was running at roughly $1m a month at peak. the legal problem was the catalog. the most popular videos on stage6 were uploaded tv episodes and movie rips, often with little pretense of fair use. divx already had pending dmca claims from major studios when it announced the shutdown.

~ the day it died ~

the shutdown notice went up on 25 february 2008. it gave four days of warning. stage6 went offline at the end of 29 february 2008. the company's statement cited cost and the difficulty of running a moderation operation at scale. cnet ran a retrospective in june 2008 that called stage6 one of the greatest defunct websites in history despite its tiny lifespan, mostly on the strength of having been the first site that proved hd web video could work technically before the business model existed to support it. youtube would not ship 720p streams until late 2008, and 1080p not until late 2009. stage6 had both eighteen months earlier and could not afford to keep them running.

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