(The picture makes sense once you read to the end). A former MeeVee employee emails in to say that he hasn’t received his 2008 tax forms from the company, and that no one will pick up the phone to say when he might receive them. We emailed Brad Greenspan, the CEO of parent company LiveUniverse (MeeVee was acquired in May 2008) for a comment. His response: “LiveUniverse is in business” (not what we asked, but good to know), and “…we haven’t had any meevee employees active in a few months as we consolidate operations of that website with a few others.”
We speculated on the health of the parent company last month after a number of high profile outages and claims by employees and business partners that they were going unpaid, but Greenspan insists LiveUniverse remains a going concern.
There’s currently a thread on Techmeme based on this blog post from Pingdom about the downtime of most of LiveUniverse’s services for the past couple of days. We’ve been getting tips about this since last Thursday, and tried contacting founder & CEO Brad Greenspan (also the founder of MySpace) for an explanation to no avail.
Pingdom caught the fact that the light has gone out for the websites Revver (which we’ve declared dead or at least struggling for life before), LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes, but missed other unreachable properties such as Peerflix. The only websites that seem to be holding up for the time being are LiveVideo, Yikers, Glumbert and MeeVee, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for those to stay online for much longer either.
Update: per comment below, PageFlakes is back, may I suggest you back up your data if you’re an active user?
Update 2: Revver’s back too, with a message saying that they’ll be down 5PM PST January 28 but they’ll be back up in the evening. We now know that didn’t happen.
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 seems up and we experience no trouble playing videos.
We’re getting reports that Peerflix, the tumultuous company that switched from acting as a DVD-swapping service to an ad network, has been acquired by Brad Greenspan’sLiveUniverse for an undisclosed amount (though we’re guessing it’s pretty low). We’ve asked LiveUniverse to comment.
Peerflix was founded in 2004 as a “peer-to-peer Netflix”, helping users to swap DVDs they owned for a dollar. The site abandoned the flat fixed pricing scheme for a demand-based model in 2006, but that didn’t work well either: in November 2007 it decided to launch a media network that had nothing to do with its original DVD swapping service. Peerflix finally canned the DVD trading business earlier this year, so Live Universe is acquiring it solely for its ad network.
After we thought the bizarre story of Stage6 was over, Brad Greenspan’s LiveUniverse has gotten involved, and the plot gets even thicker.
According to a release from LiveUniverse, the company offered to acquire Stage6 prior to the site being shut by DivX 25 February. The offer was $11 million in cash & carriage plus an equity Stake in Stage6 and Promotion of DivX Software. LiveUniverse then claims that the DivX Board “refused to engage in any direct dialogue with LiveUniverse for over 5 days, and during this time, DivX shuts down Stage6.”
Despite the site being shut for nearly 2 weeks, LiveUniverse still wants to buy it and is appealing to DivX shareholders to pressure the company into selling. DivX shareholders can visit www.livevideo.com/SaveStage6” to take initiative and proactively push the Board to do the right thing for shareholders.”
LiveUniverse is claiming that “despite daily outbound calls and emails, LiveUniverse was and is unable to reach any of the DivX executives including General Counsel David Richter who LiveUniverse was originally referred to for the purposes of buying Stage6.” The go on to say that “Directors of public companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to try to get the best deal and represent their interests, first and foremost” and “DivX Board’s decision to destroy website and its community when there was and is a firm superior offer on table from LiveUniverse raises questions of whether proper sales process was followed.”
The one part missing from LiveUniverse’s statement is why? why do they want to buy Stage6? Sure, it was a great site with a ton of traffic, but it was only great because it offered a BitTorrent style smorgasbord of pirated content without the need to download it. Without the pirated movies, the traffic on Stage6 means nothing. Either LiveUniverse knows something we don’t about the site, or they’re taking a big risk.
Meyers: “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”
Chen: “2008. We’ll do it this year.
“Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”
Now for the guessing game: which live video startup will fold first once YouTube dominates the market? YouTube will be last to market, but the same momentum that has seen YouTube dominate video will now be applied to live video. Like video, content creators want to be on the service that gives them the most exposure, no matter how good the alternatives area (after all, YouTube doesn’t offer the best quality video). YouTube already has the user base; live video streamers will flock to YouTube like a moth to a flame.
LiveVideo.com from MySpace founder Brad Greenspan’s company LiveUniverse is yet another live streaming service, but it combines the best of existing services with Yahoo Live style functionality for a package worth looking at.
LiveVideo.com offers the following features:
show archiving, so users can record shows to be played back later
embedding of live streams
chat associated with the stream
video conferencing Yahoo Live style, in that users can add other streaming users to their page and interact with them
Comment board/ profile page similar to YouTube where users can leave comments
Photo gallery, no quite Flickr, but allows users to share photos
LiveUniverse is pitching LiveVideo.com as “the first fully interactive, global, live streaming platform;” it’s not, but it is a feature rich offering that may well find favor.
Launched in 2006, BlogCharm promised to pay bloggers for blogging at the site, another variation on the blog network theme. Bloggers were paid on a straight 50% rev share based on revenue made against their content from a mixture of CPM ads and Adsense units.
According to a BlogCharm member who contacted TechCrunch, they have been waiting months to be paid, and despite sending multiple emails have never received a response. A quick search of the BlogExplosion forums finds more members who have never been paid, with payments due since December 2006. There’s no shortage of people outside of the BlogExplosion forums who have bad things to say about BlogCharm as well; WebUpon reported in June 2007 that “Blogcharm does not pay,” and PaidOpps simply suggested that BlogCharm was a scam.
Ownership of the site isn’t immediately clear. BlogCharm has a powered by Blog Explosion badge on it, there are no contact details aside from an online form located on Blogexplosion and the registration details for the site are hidden by a private proxy service. Blog Explosion on the other hand is registered to West Hollywood based Live Universe and sits on the same server as BlogCharm so it would be reasonable to suggest that Live Universe may well be the owner of both sites. Having said that BlogCharm (along with Blog Explosion) has changed hands at least once, having sold in June 2006 for a reported “six figure” sum, then at least according to the BlogExplosion forums, someone called Chris was tasked with “fixing” BlogExplosion (and we’d presume the other related sites) in November this year. Whether Chris is a new owner or simply an employee given management of the site was not detailed, indeed there was no details other than a name and a promise to fix the mess.
Live Universe was founded by Brad Greenspan, best known as one of the founders of MySpace and in more recent years for his opposition to News Corps acquisition of MySpace. Live Universe runs sites including LiveVideo.com, a top 1000 site online (according to Alexa), BlinkYou.com, Lyrics Download and acquired Flurl.com in October 2006.
I can’t say for certain that the buck stops with Live Universe due to the shaky ownership history of BlogCharm and Blog Explosion; whether they purchased the site in June 2006 or have only just purchased it now, or even offloaded it (based on the Chris comments) is not clear, but at some stage or another (presuming the registration details are legitimate) Live Universe may have been involved with the site and bloggers weren’t paid. We’ve asked Live Universe for comment and if they respond we’ll happily update the post, but ultimately someone must take responsibility for BlogCharm. The site is still taking new members today; I found bloggers writing about joining the site on the promise of getting paid in the last few weeks. Given that the site has failed to pay its members in the past, at the very least new membership applications should cease until such time that the outstanding payments are made, or if they are not to be forthcoming the site shut completely and creditors paid from any sale.
(The picture makes sense once you read to the end). A former MeeVee employee emails in to say that he hasn’t received his 2008 tax forms from the company, and that no one will pick up the phone to say when he might receive them. We emailed Brad Greenspan, the CEO of parent company LiveUniverse (MeeVee was acquired in May 2008) for a comment. His response: “LiveUniverse is in business” (not what we asked, but good to know), and “…we haven’t had any meevee employees active in a few months as we consolidate operations of that website with a few others.” 
After we thought 
LiveVideo.com
