Tom (aka Spinner), a Stage6 user and an employee of Divx, has announced that Stage6 will be no more after February 28, 2008.

He says, “Stage6 began as an experiment, and we always knew there was a chance that it might not succeed.”

Upload functionality has been disabled, and videos will only be available until Thursday.

Companies hosting their videos on Stage6 are being helped to migrate their videos to other pages, DivX says.

Users are quickly attempting to mirror videos from Stage6 to other video services.

Veoh currently allows uploads from a URL and because of this users are able use Stage6’s bandwidth when moving the videos.

So if other video services are still around why is Stage 6 shutting the service down?

Tom says, “The short answer is that Stage6 is very expensive and requires an enormous amount of attention and resources.There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it appears to be as simple as that.”

However, Stage6 has been known for users uploading full copies of movies that are still in theaters, many in HD quality.

They have complied with all take down requests when copyright infringement is in question, but this has not saved them from costly lawsuits.

In our article “Divx’s Stage6 Walks Closer To Piracy Plank” we looked at Universal Music Group’s lawsuit accusing Divx of digital piracy.

Legal battles such as this could surely cause a company to close its doors.

Stag6 was launched in 2006 by Divx with the mission of empowering content creators and viewers to discover a new kind of video experience.

Like Youtube & other video services, users are able to upload videos and share them with others.

It’s to bad that one of the only HD streaming video site is closing its doors.

Please take a moment to read over the official announcement here and if your looking for some discussion head here.

Link: Stage6, Quicksilverscreen

Categories: News, Tech
Tags: features, stage6, Video