It’s Stage6 Day here on Web TV Wire and Web TV Hub (23/04/07). Learn more…
Video sharing sites like YouTube, Daily Motion and Metacafe share one thing in common which has aided their success. They use a simple flash video player that is instantly accessible by almost all internet users without any effort.
However, Stage6 has been unable to make their videos as instantly accessible because you need to install the DivX video player first in order to watch the videos. While it enables you to watch the high quality videos on the site it will put off those less tech savvy surfers.
Stage6 are aware of this issue and Darrius Thompson, the co-founder of DivX said “The plug-in aspect definitely impacts us”, but he did also point out that the DivX software has been downloaded over 200 million times from the Stage6 site alone.
That is definitely an impressive number, but I don’t think it directly translates to the number of Stage6 users as the same user may install the software multiple times, or install updates.
Darrius also went on to say that using alternative formats on the site to make it more accessible is “something we will be doing in the future”.
Personally installing the video player does not bother me that much, but I know many who will run away scared at the thought of installing something on their PC which means DivX is losing a lot of potential viewers.
