As video-sharing sites flood the Internet in the wake of YouTube’s blinding success, it becomes an exercise of patience to find one that sets itself apart with a new approach. Clones are only interesting in biology. But DivX’s recently launched Stage6 could very well be the successor instead of the clone.
You’ll notice right away when pulling up Stage6 the high resolution of the videos, which is a testament to the DivX compression technology and a diversion from the low-quality Flash-based offerings of YouTube and other wannabes.
Therein lies the barrier with the advantage, writes GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher. “We could only watch videos by downloading the DivX media player,” she writes, “and video makers can only upload content with DivX-encoded files – both of which can be a barrier to wide adoption.”
Much of the approach is per usual: featured “hottest” videos, tagging, search, sharing. But Stage6 also presents numerous channels that offer music videos, movie trailers, content from G4TV, the Cooking Channel, TreeHuggerTV, a French and a German channel, anime, College Humorwell, you name it, as long as its not adult.
The killer app here though, is that DivX technology can be burned to disc and played on DVD players and other devices. Fehrenbacher reports that company is working on a download-to-own service, that could rocket the business model to iPod levels.
This makes the upcoming DivX IPO an attractive speculation (and gamble). Investors expect the IPO could raise up to $135 million.
In the Stage6 publisher agreement, the company seeks to make it clear to users that they still own their content, which not an allowance made by many other user-generated content sites. From the agreement:
Let’s make one thing clear up front: you own your content. We do not own your content. Nothing in this agreement changes that in any way. Let’s make another thing clear: we are not trying to screw you. (If you’re a bit of a cynic about these types of agreements, we understand. But hear us out before judging us. We’re trying to do the right thing.)
With the technology, the right business model, good management, proper licensing, and a good foundation of user trust, Stage6 could reach great heights.
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