Vrideo
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Vrideo was a Santa Monica-based immersive video platform founded in 2014 by Alex Rosenfeld and Kuangwei Hwang. Billed as the YouTube of VR, it let users discover and stream 360-degree immersive video across the web, mobile devices and VR headsets, with apps for Oculus Rift, SteamVR, PlayStation VR, Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR. Creators could upload 360 video for free; the service was installed some 700,000 times and was highly rated on PlayStation VR.
02 / Vrideo FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Vrideo was outfunded and outgunned. It raised only about $2 million while competing for 360-degree video hosting against Jaunt (which had raised $65 million) and platform giants like Google's YouTube and Facebook, both of which promoted 360 video for free. The founder said the company had stretched its modest funding as far as it could go, especially as bandwidth and storage costs rose with growth. With all content free and the planned creator marketplace and interactive advertising never materializing, there was no path to revenue.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Vrideo was founded in Santa Monica by Alex Rosenfeld and Kuangwei Hwang as an immersive video platform for 360-degree content.
- Seed funding
The company raised a $1.8 million seed round backed by Lerer Hippeau, Betaworks, Advancit Capital and others, bringing total funding to about $2 million.
- Shutdown announced
In November 2016, founder and CEO Alex Rosenfeld announced the shutdown in a blog post titled 'Taking Our Goggles Off', saying the modest funding had been stretched as far as it could go; the service was wound down.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Vrideo raised about $2 million in total, including a $1.8 million seed round in 2015 backed by Lerer Hippeau, Betaworks, Advancit Capital and others.
- 02
In November 2016, founder and CEO Alex Rosenfeld announced the shutdown in a blog post titled 'Taking Our Goggles Off', saying the modest funding had been stretched as far as it could go.
- 03
The service was shut down and creators were asked to contact the company to retrieve any videos they had no local copies of; no buyer or asset sale was reported.