LiveVideo.com, an online live video community that is a subsidiary of LiveUniverse, Inc. has now acquired 100% of Revver‘s stock. The acquistion will combine Revver’s millions of visitors and 40 million monthly video streams with LiveVideo’s social network, video, and live interactive offerings used by 200,000+ users per day. Both companies wil continue to operate their separate domains. Although Revver is happy by the deal and the promotion opportunities is will allow, Revver would have never been in this position if it wasn’t for MySpace’s decision to kill Revver in the first place.
By 2007, Revver was showing a good pattern of growth and was quickly heading towards becoming a profitable company. But then, in mid-January, something happened. All of a sudden Revver’s video player that its users could embed on any web site or social network stopped working…but only on MySpace. Most of Revver’s users never knew what happened. Maybe they thought the Revver player was poorly designed. Maybe they thought they did it wrong. It doesn’t really matter, though – they just moved on, migrating over to other services like YouTube.
It was a small group of Revver users that learned the truth: Revver wasn’t broken, MySpace was blocking them.
This group of Revver users and content creators, led by content producers, including the popular “Ask A Ninja” guys, led a PR campaign to save Revver. On the Ninja blog, they plea to their fans:
Ask A Ninja was created because we were in control of where we posted the videos. That’s a big deal because if we’re forced to put them on MySpace video then FOX could take the episodes and make money off of them without paying Douglas or me anything. Which isn’t fair and takes away the incentive to create cool shows for you to watch. Why is this against Net Neutrality? Because videos from Myspace Video and Youtube are not effected. It’s only these smaller, more innovative companies that haven’t been sold for billions of dollars. Here’s what you can do: Copy this bulletin. Repost it. Blog about it. Make Tom put up a little fix it bulletin saying he’s sorry..
So the fans blogged, they complained, and they urged others to complain, but it was to no avail.
As 2007 drew on, it quickly became the year of MySpace playing the big bully, attempting to destroy small and medium-sized companies they felt were competitive with their offerings.
Other companies got Revver’s same treatment – Stickam and imeem to name a couple. MySpace even blocked Photobucket for a while – long enough for other investors to walk away – and then swooped in to buy the company for themselves.
Several URLs are still blocked on MySpace (for a complete list of URLs and blocked code, check out this site). MySpace continues to block Revver to this day.
