VEOH FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY

[JFC]

Posting this here instead of Akihabara because of how widespread and how much VEOH is used by so many people around the world.

Veoh Co-Founder Confirms Bankruptcy
- 02.12.10
by Chloe Albanesius

The co-founder of video Web site Veoh confirmed Wednesday night that the recession and legal troubles have prompted the site to file for bankruptcy.

"Unfortunately, great vision, a passionate team, tens of millions of users, millions in revenues and victory in court were not enough," co-founder Dmitry Shapiro wrote in a note on his Web site. "The distraction of the legal battles and the challenges of the broader macro-economic climate have led to our Chapter 7 bankruptcy."

Veoh, a site that includes professional and user-generated content, debuted in 2005 "with a bold goal: To make it possible for anyone with a video camera and a computer to broadcast video to the world," Shapiro wrote.

Two years in, however, the site found itself locked in a legal battle with Universal Music Group. Veoh preemptively sued UMG in August 2007 after the company threatened to take legal action over Veoh's use of Universal content. Universal responded several weeks later with its own copyright infringement suit.

In September 2009, Veoh was handed a victory when a California judge threw out UMG's copyright infringement case against the video site. Veoh made every effort to remove infringing material from its site, as is required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and was protected by the law's safe harbor clause, according to the court.

"While we made every effort to convince them that we were not their enemy and had not infringed on their content, they pursued a relentless war of attrition against us in federal court," Shapiro wrote Wednesday.

A year earlier, Veoh also won a copyright infringement case filed by adult entertainment company IO Group, which sued Veoh in 2006 after it discovered clips from 10 of its films on Veoh.com. Rather than file DMCA takedown notices, IO immediately filed suit against the video company. Veoh banned adult content from its site during the trial.

Despite the fact that it prevailed in several legal battles, the cost of fighting took its toll on the site. Veoh announced in April 2009 that it would lay off 25 staffers and refocus on its video compass browser plug-in – despite the $70 million in capital that the company raised from investors such as Intel, Time Warner, and Goldman Sachs.

"We grew our passionate audience base to over 28 million users per month, built a business with a run rate of $12 million, and helped educate many blue chip advertisers about the bright future that online video holds for them," Shapiro said.

"This is a critically important time in the evolution of the Internet as an open communications medium, and all of us at Veoh wish those companies that continue to innovate in the space, great success," he concluded. "This chapter of our lives has come to an end, but a bright new chapter will soon begin, and I assure all of you reading this that we have lots of important work ahead of us. Stay tuned, you will hear from us again!"

Veoh.com is currently still live. Shapiro did not provide any details on when it might go dark, or what will happen to existing content.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359105,00.asp



So for the time being, it's still up, however it's hard NOT to worry about the site going completely down (I remember when it happened to DivX's Stage6 site). So if you've UL'ed a bunch of stuff onto VEOH and have no other copies of it saved anywhere, or if you use VEOH to watch/follow certain shows, or if you just have a bunch of videos on there that you particularly like but that you don't have saved yet, you might want to grab them ASAP while it's still up and running...just in case.

[kuro808]

wow this is big, one of the main competitors in video hosting, has gone down to bankruptcy, well it seems that the after effects of the recession has finally hit

[shurastriker]

FUCKERS!!! i just hate them for blocking regular access to almost all the countries except the "first world" ones... i'mnot happy for the workers but surely i can go to party

[shadowstar]

FUCKERS!!! i just hate them for blocking regular access to almost all the countries except the "first world" ones... i'mnot happy for the workers but surely i can go to party

Amen to this.

[Masa]

[pikapikapika]

It's just the way larger corporations love to put smaller players out of business, sue them (unsuccessfully even) into submission and they have no money left.

Sony Europe did it to a import game retailer liksang.com, they never won anything, but just kept on sueing them until they went out of business, since sony europe just loooooooves to pricefix. they even made it illegal to import any psp or ps3 games/consoles and many online retailers are just afraid to even do it, because sony will put them out of business too.

[Slack]

Streaming video is a sucker's game, at least if you want to provide free services.  Their bandwidth and storage costs are just a huge money hole for streaming video that is extremely hard to make up with ads and other ways of not passing on the costs to the users.  Google is losing metric assloads of money on YouTube, but they can still carry on because they make so much money in their other endeavors.

When you have the industry giant hell-bent on competing in your field with no regard to how much it costs, it's awfully hard to compete.

[Ishtar]

O_____________________O
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
Oh my fucking God....this is so sad!

[1517]

.... for blocking regular access to almost all the countries except the "first world" ones...

blocked



maybe my country is not in profitable class for Veoh.