It isn’t every day a top 200 site in worldwide traffic shuts down, but for Stage6 it’s been a long time coming. DivX announced today that they will be shutting down their video sharing site at the end of the month. DivX’s Tom Huntington broke the news to users:

So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.

The company had tried unsuccessfully to sell the company, but despite its high traffic the operational costs (and legal risks - the site is rife with unlicensed content) were apparently too high.

DivX will instead focus its full attention on its core competency of creating industry-leading compression technology and will let others figure out how to make money delivering it online.