LiveUniverse Offers $11 Mln for Stage6

By Geoff Duncan March 10, 2008

Two weeks ago, DivX formally announced it was planning to shutter its Stage6 video sharing site, claiming that it couldn’t justify the overhead of running a video sharing service while simultaneously trying to push DivX technology into as many consumer video systems as possible. According to DivX, the company had been mulling what to do with Stage6 for some time, and decided to shut it down only after determining that selling the operation or spinning it off into a separate company wouldn’t work out.

Now LiveUniverse has stepped up and announced it has been offering $11 million for the assets of Stage6.com—only DivX has refused to engage in any dialog with LiveUniverse. LiveUniverse questions whether DivX’s board has been acting in the best interest off its investors: after all, on the face of it, $11 million in the bank would seem to be a better return than shuttering the site and destroying the online community that has developed around it.

LiveUniverse operates four video sites that the company says receive more than 200 million page views per month; it would like to merge Stage6 into those sites to create a new entity it believes would get 400 million page views a month. LiveUniverse’s offer actually consists of $3 million in cash, $5 million in online advertising credits that DivX can use on the LiveUniverse sites, and a 10 percent equity stake in the new entity. If, after three years, DivX wants to cash out its stake, LiveUniverse will pay a minimum of $3 million for it.

Just last week, LiveVideo—one off LiveUniverse’s sites—bought Revver; part of LiveUniverse’s offer is to leverage the Revver technology to drive interest in a revamped Stage6 site.

So far, DivX has not responded to LiveUniverse’s offer, and the Stage6 service is currently shut down.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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