Kaiser Soze's Blog

Vreel, worth the wait?

Online high defenition video is proving itself as being a very though ride to make some money of it. It’s like having your capital villa on the hill side with lot’s of unkown people sleeping over and no one is willing to pay rent. I used to be a big fan of the DiVX owned video sharing website Stage6. Unfortunatly Stage6 wasn’t here to stay. Lot’s of websites started leeching content from Stage6 making it a very expensive operation to keep the website going. Just before having to raise the white flag, the DiVX corperation decided they should try selling the whole thing. Which due to serious drama and lot’s of stupidity didn’t go as expected and a few days later the whole project was cancelled and Stage6 was no more….

In finding the one and only Stage6 successor I stumbled upon Vreel a few months ago. At first I couldn’t surpress small laughter because it made me feel I was back at stage6 again. The whole ‘look-and-feel’ was quite the same and they we’re also using the divx webplayer and thus supporting high definition video.

Vreel started growing at an explosive rate and was soon facing the same leech problems that killed off Stage6. One might say it is naive to start a website similiar to Stage6 and think this will not happen to you. On the other hand I do agree that using the Stage6 approach problably was a smart thing to do to get your name up and pull in some visitors.

So the Vreel staff decided to close the website for a while giving them time to develop a new player and website that should solve the leeching problems. Maybe not the smartest thing to do but it was probably their only solution. Now, since then I have been following the Vreel forums and it has been nothing but negativity coming from them. All I have seen is false promisses, missed deadlines and bad decisions. To me it seems a group of baboons with some copy-paste knowledge are running the project. I think most will agree when evaluating the following timeline: (there was a very detailed timeline that I wanted to post here of all the false promisses and disasters of Vreel on wikipedia. but this has been completely removed! So I tried to make a new one, it’s not so accurate as the orignial wiki because I wasn’t able to find all the correct facts and dates.)

• Vreel start as DivxIt
• DivX, Inc., issue a cease and desist order against Vreel for copyright infringment
• New domain vreel.net
• The original beta test of VReel.net was scheduled to begin on 18th May. However on the 23rd, VReel released a statement in its updates forum stating that its development team was late in releasing the beta version of the site, and that as of that date, they legally had 2 more days to deliver the beta release. This did not occur however, and the site’s lead developer is currently in an arbitration process with the development team. Towards the end of the update, the lead developer states that a new development team was to be selected “in the next 5 days”, a period which would end on the 27th.
• The site underwent an Open Beta test stage which started on June 19, 2008 after a delay of 4 days.
• VReel servers went down on Saturday 31 May due to the recent fire at the The Planet data center, and returned on Wednesday 4 June.
• Because of multiple leech sites stealing their bandwidth during the contruction of beta V2, VReel has gone offline.
• Vreel is Proudly?!?!? presenting their new software partner…. Zango (malicious adware)
• Removal of Zango after negative feedback. Vreel announces this decision was made by the users.
• Vreel anounces finishing the beta: “Right now we’re looking at Beta v2 being 100% completed towards the end of the month – aroundabouts the 28th or 29th (September)”
• VReel Player leak. A very early model of the Vreel Player (v0.1.0a) leaked.
• Vreel releases first screenhots of “their” player
• Vreel announces Beta v2 will launch with full functionality, only desktopdimmer and pop-out player will follow later on
• Beta is announced in two weeks
• Vreel announces beta will is delayed and will NOT be launched with their player. But will still be using the DiVX webplayer.
• On November 4th, Administrator “Moriella” departed from VReel, after having been refused pay. Moriella then used her Administration position to send an email to all registered members on VReel’s forum, claiming that VReel was in a large amount of debt, and likely would not relaunch or survive.
• Vreel responce waves away mass e-mail, blames personality of Moriella.
• Vreel releases two screenshots of the new design.

To wrap up this story, I have lost all confidence in Vreel. I do not think they will last long (probably won’t even make it out of beta stage) and i’m advising people not to pay for any premium account since your money will probably be gone in two months. I know lot’s of people may disagree with me but this is just how I feel about the whole Vreel story, I really do hope they prove me wrong in 2009. English may not always be correct as it is not my native language. This story is also posted on my blog where it won’t be closed and comments will not be removed.

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