We’ve been getting a lot of tips from people who have been having problems reaching the Revver website lately, getting videos uploaded or playing the ones already hosted on the platform. We haven’t paid much attention to them so far, because every time we check, the site appears to be running smoothly and we experience no trouble playing videos.
But a quick glance on Twitter shows something is definitely up.
What’s worse than uptime issues, though, is that the company apparently has some trouble meeting payments. Rumors are circulating that employees haven’t been getting their paychecks on time either, adding to the assumption that Revver is now on its last legs.
Revver, founded in 2004, was one of the first video sharing sites to start sharing revenue with content creators. In September 2007, everything looked rosy when the company said it had managed to pay $1 million to video producers and their affiliates over a period of one year. By February 2008, the company was collecting debt, laying off staff and reportedly put itself up for sale.
Revver was in fact acquired nearly two weeks after our post, by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse for “about $5 million“. Revver had raised a total of $12.7 million in two rounds from Comcast, Turner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III.
But now it seems Revver is on the ropes once again, and may be headed for the deadpool soon. I also can’t help but notice that the LiveUniverse website doesn’t even mention the social video property anywhere, not even in its media kit.
We have an e-mail in with Greenspan asking for more information and will update the post if necessary.
Update: Greenspan checked in and says they are in the middle of major migration from a CDN/provider to a tier 1 & top technology provider which “should make the quality of Revver videos displayed better then ever” (could take a few days).
No word on the complaints about actual downtime and delay or lack of payments to content creators yet, so we’re sticking to the story.
That’s funny. All 4 Revver forum links refused to load for me. Add another to list of Revver being down!
I’m on TimeWarner cable for those curious.
Duh, when founders leave and the company hasn’t been successful it is a bad sign. Two Revvr founders bailed because of the lack of success. http://www.digisynd.com/ was the next company for at least one founder and that was acquired by Disney.
Maybe now we can say that Revver is gonna join the list in Fucked startups..wonder what kept them running so long…
I have Revver throughout my investor site and all the videos have been working perfectly, e.g.:
http://stocksto...ions-investing/
Wrong. From here in Austin. Videos FAIL.
Lol, here from Europe also
Hmm, intermittent connection issues… Might be related to the Sprint/Cogent peering problems?
http://www.pcma...,2333750,00.asp
Revver’s dead. I had an account there but now I can’t upload anything anymore.
Works fine over here in Europe.
Yep works fine in Europe. Another question: Why would you buy a company for 5 millionen Dollar and terminate it a few month later? Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
Revver Works for Me {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/0W8sd9PlC9_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Revver Works for Me ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/SeqlmgvqB9″}}}
this is really interesting considering INC magazine just did that cover story sizing Kevin Rose as a media mogul who owns an online newspaper, an online television network, and an online communications platform. Last I heard, CBS didn’t just go on a hiatus.
Woops, nevermind. I misread the title. I was talking about Revision 3.
typical ace reporting by tinycomb; have you ever had a real job? didn’t think so…
My videos posted on http://www.flixya.com still seem to work. Revver loads as well. Dr. Halloween. Hopefully they dont join f*ckedcompany soon. Have a lot of videos posted there.
Most likely trying to plug the holes in a sinking ship by turning down their CDN and bandwidth. Their shark is well and truly jumped, they should just shoot it now and put it out of its misery.
I gave up on revver over a year ago.
I can get to it fine from a speakeasy endpoint, but not from a cogent endpoint. Traceroute from speakeasy shows it goes through sprint. So the “downtime” may actually be sprint and cogent’s disagreement.
It’s one hundred percent the fault of Sprint. They stopped peering with Cogent. Where is the FCC on this. Sprint should be fined millions for doing this. Sprint can’t stand that they are an also ran company that can’t make money. Sprint is the worst!
It’s still down for me. I couldn’t access it yesterday either. And it’s true that they haven’t paid content creators recently. Every week there’s some sort of “delay” and we’re given the ole “One more week…maybe” crap.
Revver owes me over $200 dollars for my videos. Will I ever see that money? Hmm, I kinda doubt it at this point. But the fault really lies on the shoulders of LiveUniverse. They’re apparently not releasing the money (if they even have it) and the Revver employees and forum moderators are left with their hands tied, trying their best to keep the video creators calm – some of whom are owed more than $2,500.
As for the “major migration from a CDN/provider to a tier 1 & top technology provider” …it’s awfully funny that there wasn’t any announcement or mention of it! At least not one that I saw anywhere. I know the last time they did a migration they told us about it well ahead of time and kept us informed continually throughout the entire process…letting us know exactly when the outages would occur, when videos would be down, etc.
So they’re either lowering their standards drastically, or this so-called migration is just a line of bs from Greenspan. Either way, it’s entirely unacceptable. I certainly hope Revver makes out OK and becomes the site it has the potential to become. But only time will tell.
never noticed any problem here in Europe
In Tampa – Revver hasn’t been working for three days.
Here’s the real deal, folks. LU and Brad G have been totally screwing vendors, service providers and employees for months, as well as the VC’s and founders of the companies he’s bought. He’s at the point where non-payment to partners and vendors are causing serious outages to his sites and even the internet and phone service at his office in West Hollywood. He’s always claiming site outages and service interruptions are some kind of technical glitch, but checking with the vendors such as Rackspace, Level3, etc, will reveal that he owes TONS of money to these guys. Many vendors and providers (the smart ones) have filed suit against LU. He also tells his employees that there are ADP glitches when they don’t get paid. It was tough to make up an explanation, though, when the remaining handful of employees of the Silicon Valley companies he bought were all evicted from their (formerly MeeVee’s) office in Burlingame due to non-payment, and are all working from home.
The smart people have all left LU, as they don’t buy this bullshit and see the handwriting on the wall, and know that no investor in their right mind would invest in crazy, vengeful and litigious Brad’s business. Even the dumb ones that are left are starting to figure out that Brad will eventually screw everyone he comes into contact with.
Works for me. My company will still be standing when the rest of these bloated, overfunded, poorly-run media shops goes under.
Brad is not paying anybody since the beginning of 2008…
Foo Bar, I was thinking the same thing. My startup consists of a server and myself. Self funded startups will survive this recession while the hyped and over funded startups will crash and burn. Hey TC, you need to deadpool my competitor dabble.com. I am not trying to be spiteful, but I was surprise that you review them, but not me. Must be a west coast thing???
Brad Greenspan tried to buy my company 5 years ago. He is very, very slimy. He spews more BS that a used car salesman.
Completely agree. LiveUniverse is in big trouble, and EVERYONE associated with it has not been paid or are being screwed over. What a bunch of BS.
I sure hope this isn’t true, I got almost 200 videos on the site and use it as part of my e-com system to both generate extra revenue and share animations with potential customers without having to worry about bandwidth costs.
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
Revver always seemed like a pretty crappy video sharing website in my opinion. For the guys who made revenue with Revver… HOW?!
Seems like Sprint has temporarily re-enabled their link to Cogent. You can see that the links have been re-enabled @ http://www.internetpulse.net/ . If people still can’t connect to Revver that means something else is up.
Sprint has a page up @ https://www.spr....net/cogent.php with more information about the issue. Apparently Cogent was given 30 days notice about the disconnect and they never had a free peering agrement. There’s also a lawsuit pending for payment that Sprint never received.
Sprint and Cogent have resolved their dispute for now. However, Revver still does not load here in New York. It’s very odd to read the reports from different geographic locations that claim the site is working.
The one thing i have found in common with everyone complaining about not being able to access revver is that each and every one of these people are the unfortunate customers of TimeWarnerCable(myself included). They seem to be blocking it. I was able to access revver just fine through a proxy (www.hidemyass.com) though the videos still refused to load as i expected they might through a proxy. So yeah . . call up TimeWarner and give them some shit about it.
As of now, Nov 3rd 11:33 CET, everything seems to work OK. I’m able to connect to the site without a problem. Loads faster than techcrunch, actually.
I am copying and pasting my own comment I made to a valleywag post about LiveUniverse struggling to pay its employees. It is important that the word gets out: DO NOT CONDUCT BUSINESS WITH BRAD GREENSPAN.
—
As an ex-Live Universe employee, it looks like I got out just in time.
The upper management of LU are some of the most incompetent, petty people I have ever met. How Greenspan managed to assemble such a bumbling, under-qualified and uniquely idiotic executive team is a testament to his own lack of business sense. Only a real cynic (or idiot) could believe that he could place in key positions people such as this: an unproven 31 year old CEO whose way of dealing with problems is avoiding them; a coke-headed sports agent (with one client) who never even bothered to learn the site he was selling; a bitter, insecure refugee from the porn industry with two carpet-shitting dogs and no apparent aptitude for anything but spouting panicked bullshit; a waiter (yes, a waiter–’nuff said); a self-professed internet content guru who has actually done nothing in his professional life (Ask A Ninja my ass); a 20 year old slacker whose sole claim to fame was writing a pro-Greenspan blog (hired on the spot, of course); and the Vietnamese brother of the CTO who was given a blank check to steal from the company in order to start his own.
Well played, Mr. Greenspan. The “Genius of Myspace” strikes again.
As another former employee I have to admit that Liveuniverse was appallingly dysfunctional. It really is a top-down problem. You’d think the embarrassment would light a fire under someone’s ass but it seems like this one will be a slow crawl into the gutter. It’s unfortunate for some of it’s better properties.
yeah I have time warner and I can’t get to revver at all – none of the clips on my site – chillys.tv are pulling anything from revver. this is terrible.
Three days since my first comment here and I still can’t access it. I’m on Bright House, which is owned by Time Warner, so yeah, looks like I need to give them a call and do some bitching. I can get it to load through a proxy, but of course, no videos will play.
I haven’t been able to access it either. I just now realized all my Revver embeds are not working. If they were having trouble they should have given us some warning so that we could replace our videos with other embeds. I don’t have time to do it at the moment which sucks.
I rank at the top of the search engines for some really SWEET keywords using revver videos… but when you click on them, they ALL timeout!! WTF!?
@Tomboys: Actually, they are working. It seems that the only people who can’t see them are those whose ISP is Time Warner or owned by Time Warner.
I can’t access anything on Revver at home, but here at a friend’s house, everything works fine. I can pull up the site and videos play with no problems at all. So the problem seems to be with Time Warner. If your ISP is Time Warner or a subsidiary of them, I suggest you give them a call and do some major complaining! This is beyond ridiculous.
Yep! I have Time Warner and I can’t see any of my own videos. My site is literally down because I use all Revver Videos.
Has anybody with Time Warner received any sort of explanation from Revver? Is Revver acknowledging this as a problem on their site? I am with Time Warner and the Revver service has been down for more than 10 days.
@Dot TV: Yes, they’ve addressed it in for forums, but didn’t go into any details as to what’s actually happening and why. Here’s what was posted:
“If you’re using Time Warner to connect to the internet, you probably haven’t been able to access anything Revver related (including this post) for a couple days. We’re working on getting that fixed.”
revver does not pay and its website and forums have been shutdown !
revver owns more then 50000 to its users ! they run away ! someone should sue their ass they own me 40 dollars !!!! goddamit
I’ve started a site to collect testimonials from people who haven’t been paid by Revver (or Peerflix, or whoever else) ever since Live Universe bought them. If you’re one of the people getting hosed, let me know about it! http://www.live...s-me-money.com/
Dammit, they are royally f*cking dead. My f*cking sh*t 50 dollars.
Well, looks like the issue has finally been remedied! I can finally access the site no probs.
Dunno who’s fault it was…Time Warner’s or Revver’s, but I spent 3 days working it out with the technicians from my ISP and it looks like it’s finally been fixed. Ticket escalated, ticket escatlated, ticket escalated, you know the drill.
Did a Run cmd promt and pinged Revver’s IP address to give them the necessary info. to show them where the connection was failing. They scheduled a tech to come out, but right before he came out, he called to tell me he couldn’t access the site either on his Time Warner connection, and that he would report it as an issue not related to just one person’s computer/Internet connection.
Ticket escalated again. Issue fixed…finally. Thank goodness.
@revversux: Revver has always paid me, and their site and forums have NOT been shut down. But yes, this last time around, I have not been paid…yet. Hopefully, it’s only a temporary issue. Obviously, Live Universe really needs to get its act together…and quickly. If they don’t, then Revver may eventually be no longer, and Live Universe will likely see quite a lot of lawsuits. In the meantime, I’m just glad I can finally access the site.
Thank you for the feedback. I was patient and Revver finally came back online! w00t!
I am glad Revver came back or I would have to switch to some other video platform and update 100+ posts on my site.
An update–
Revver has been down for more than 7 hours now.
This is the message I get when I try to access them..
“Oops! This link appears broken.
DNS error – cannot find server.”
update–
its working fine again.
I looked at Revver today and could not get on. Do you have any idea what the story is?
Just chiming in to say I have been trying for 2 days and can’t get on… and I use Revver for my rss and to stream my episode archive page of 50 + videos…I guess I mean I “used” revver. Would be nice for anyone over there to speak up.
We contacted Live Universe founder and CEO Brad Greenspan about it, who says the downtime is simply a part of migration to a new data center in Los Angeles that has “lots of servers.”
http://news.cne...10153816-2.html
Haha… i guess new data center with “lots of servers” ran out of space for Live Universe!
Revver is dead. It does not work any where.
http://www.zolaenterprises.com did an article on it and seems revver has been down weeks at a time many times. Seems shocking now when it works. Also seems they are not really tracking anyway on most those sites an video pages. Also the guys and people there have not been paid in so long with some of them that they are getting scared. Read this.
http://www.zola...bsites-like.htm Seems they own the microsoftvideos.com site and had to change a lot still are seems.
Recently I deleted all my videos/account from revver.com; however, my name is unfortunately still linked to revver.com site with many Google Search Engine results. Revver.com fails to give Google Search Engine recognizable Standard Error 404 Error pages for deleted videos. Revver.com customer support department did not answer to my question at all. I did not want money, all I asked is the removal of deleted video links from Google Search Engine Index. I will never upload any video to revver.com.