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DivX takes on YouTube
I met with DivX representatives recently to discuss its new video-uploading website, www.stage6.com. DivX's European managing director Mark Lawson told me: "We hope to grow as big as YouTube."
Stage6 focuses on providing much higher quality video than YouTube by using its own mpeg4 compression. In comparison, YouTube uses a low bit-rate Flash player.
Unlike YouTube, Stage6 lets you download and store every video to your computer. Lawson also stated Stage6 will allow anyone to charge for their own content. By doing this DivX hopes for a lot of interest from independent studios.
The site has been around for eight weeks now and still has a lot of work to do. It lacks the variety YouTube has, especially anything that possibly infringes copyright. In response to this Lawson said: "we don't monitor any of the free content". Instead inappropriate content is removed when a certain number of users say so.
Lawson pities the movie industry and claimed it was "too late" on digital distribution. He says they have been technologically ready for two years and by not licensing or selling moves online they have made the same mistake as the music industry did, resulting in widespread internet piracy.
My initial impressions of the service are favourable. Quality is good and the website has a clean feel about it. The file sizes are typically 10mb per minute of footage, which is vastly higher than YouTube's clips. You must have DivX installed on your system or download the 2.5MB DivX web player. In my opinion this is its Achilles heel and means it won't ever gain the widespread appeal of YouTube.
Comparisons are easy to draw. A dancing video on stage6 looks much better than the one on YouTube, but takes much longer to download.
Posted by Emil Larsen on November 20, 2006 | Permalink
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