VReel

» see vreel.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

DivX killed Stage6 in February 2008, and within weeks there were people building a replacement. One of them put up a site called DivXIt.net and got itself onto the Digg front page. Then it found out what happens when a trademark holder notices you have put its brand in your domain name.

What happened next is the odd part. The DivXIt people answered the cease and desist by offering to hand the domain over, and asked for a codec license in exchange. DivX took the deal. So the site signed the domain away and renamed itself VReel. It went on serving high-definition video in a proprietary format, with the blessing of the company whose lawyers had just written to it. Limelight Networks came in with hosting. EdgeCast handled distribution. A site with no money was running on other people's pipes from the start.

VReel dates its launch to 31 May 2008. The beta had been due on 18 May and the first development team missed it. The lead developer went into arbitration, and the site did not recover until 4 June. On 3 August it switched video playback off entirely, because other sites were hotlinking its files and the bandwidth bill was being spent on strangers. It promised to be back online by 30 August and was not. For a service whose logo said IT'S SHOW TIME, the first summer was a lot of dark screen.

~ the case file ~

~ the second beta ~

The relaunch took the rest of 2008. Private access opened on 10 November and testers were admitted in three waves through the twenty-first. A twenty-four hour public trial on 28 November went well enough that the doors were simply left open. Alexa had the site at 30,500 in July 2009 and 16,824 by that October, and the backend moved from three servers in Germany to ten in the United States, peering directly with Level 3 and AT&T.

~ the leech sites ~

Every one of VReel's problems came back to bandwidth. The August 2008 blackout was hotlinkers. In October it announced a partnership with Lavasoft and started bundling an anti-spyware product, because advertising against video pages did not pay. The player kept being promised and kept being postponed, and when the plan was finally settled in May 2009 it had changed from an open-source build on VLC to a closed-source one, on the stated grounds that an open codebase invited security problems.

None of that is unusual for a video site in 2009. What is unusual is how little margin there was underneath it. Stage6 had DivX Inc. paying the bills and still closed. VReel had a licensing favor and two CDN relationships.

~ January 2010 ~

On 20 January the homepage said the site was down due to a systems failure and recommended, of all things, a paid download service called Graboid while you waited. Five days later the page had become a goodbye, dated the day before. "As of January 24th 2010, We have decided to take the decision to close VReel as a user-generated HD DivX Video portal," it read, and then explained itself: the site "became impossible to financially sustain in a time of increasing development costs, and plummeting advertisement and revenue sources." A mass hardware failure at the main server farm had settled it. There would be no relaunch in that form.

The same notice promised something else instead. VReel was being rebuilt as a high-definition video search engine, due in April 2010, with features nobody had seen yet. The forums would stay open so the founding team could unveil a string of new projects.

~ what came back in May ~

By 23 May 2010 vreel.net was answering again, and what it served was a search box. The tabs across the top read MegaVideo, DivX, Rapidshare, MegaUpload, BitTorrent, Live Stream. A disclaimer underneath explained that VReel Search was not intended for any illegal purposes and that responsibility for your searches was yours. A Google AdSense unit sat above the results, created on 16 May. The high-definition video portal had come back as a front end for finding other people's uploads on somebody else's servers.

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