After over a year of operation, Spotplex is closing up shop, according to a message on their site. The company states that, "We regret to inform you that Spotplex is going offline. This was a very hard decision for us and we are sure you will miss the service as much as we do."
I wrote about Spotplex, back in November after having a conversation with their CEO, Doyon Kim (previously founded Dialpad, which sold to Yahoo 2005). At the time, I expressed concerns with the way that their site operates. In order for the content from a site to be included on Spotplex, the publisher of that content had to install a code snippit on their site, which also tracked analytics. The most trafficked stories were then displayed on Spotplex's homepage. I think that this restriction severely limited the amount of content that was included on the site, thus drastically reducing its value. This may not have been the best approach, in comparison to sites like Digg and Techmeme which rely on community input and not publisher participation.
TechCrunch is reporting that the reason for Spotplex's shuttering is "lack of adequate funding." Whether that means that they failed to find additional investors for the startup or that their money was poorly managed is unclear right now. I tend to think that the lack of funding might be attributed to the site not catching on as well as expected.
There is no doubt that Spotplex had talented and experienced people behind it, but, in my opinion, there were some key flaws in the site's core functionality, which really hurt them in the end.
Divx's pet video hosting project Stage6 will be discontinuing operations Thursday, Feburary 28. The service let users put up their Divx-encoded videos and make them available in high quality for other users to watch and comment on. Already uploads have been discontinued, and the site will simply cease to exist on Thursday--taking all the user videos with it.
Tom Huntington, the Divx employee who posted the closure announcement on the company blog, wrote the service was simply costing the company too much money:
As Stage6 grew quickly and dramatically (accompanied by an explosion of other sites delivering high quality video), it became clear that operating the service as a part of the larger DivX business no longer made sense. We couldn't continue to run Stage6 and focus on our broader strategy to make it possible for anyone to enjoy high quality video on any device. So, in July of last year we announced that we were kicking off an effort to explore strategic alternatives for Stage6, which is a fancy way of saying we decided we would either have to sell it, spin it out into a private company or shut it down.
I won't (and can't, really) go into too much detail on those first two options other than to say that we tried really hard to find a way to keep Stage6 alive, either as its own private entity or by selling it to another company. Ultimately neither of those two scenarios was possible, and we made the hard decision to turn the lights off and cease operation of the service.
The blowback from users has been fairly substantial.
Since announcing the discontinuation of the service early this morning there are nearly 4,000 comments on the company blog. Most users are angered there's been such short notice. Others are simply mad there's not an option to take their videos elsewhere like what Yahoo did with its photo service last year.
I'm personally sad to see the site go. Stage6 was one of the first places I got to see what had happened to the Oakland, Calif., overpass that collapsed when a fuel truck exploded below it (news story). A user had uploaded an HD copy they had taken of the fire, and it was better and more accessible than some of the early news reports.
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