Don't R.I.P., Stage6

Enjoy your next three days on Stage6, because they're the last ones you'll ever have. The site will be taken down completely on February 28th. In their own words, "... the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide." This is a cosmically huge fucking bummer since there still isn't a single video sharing site that even comes close to the functionality or overall quality of Stage6. They were the best.

One of the most important things Stage6 did was make everyone realize that watching atrociously compressed videos in an area the size of a credit card wasn't a recipe for good times. The standard for videos in general has been much higher since when ever that was that we all bought DVD players and realized VHS was never even a decent approximation of film quality. The Internet is way past due to catch up. I don't even think in all the 50+ years of broadcast television that there was anything which looked as bad as YouTube. Sorry, Google. I know you own YouTube and Blogger. Please don't send the Maps streetview team to blow off my kneecaps. I saw the pictures you took of my apartment building.

Of course someday there will be another successful, super high quality, open video sharing site, but it's too bad DivX wasn't the company smart enough to make it profitable since they'd done so much work on it already. They're certainly talented software developers. Their team fixed innumerable bugs and created the best online video player available. Google Video's player is pretty solid, but its videos are usually of lower quality and overall it's missing the community aspect that made Stage6 such a great place to find interesting content.

So, Stage6, don't rest in peace. Someone ought to dig you up as soon as they put you in the ground and reanimate the shit out of your recently departed corpse. You're one of the best tubes in the vast series of them most of us mistakenly refer to as the Internet and it'll be a shame if you leave forever.