While I was preparing my next article, a great sad news arrived to me: VRideo shuts down. With a long, sad and warm message on their blog, they closed their platform yesterday. They were one of the most famous VR video apps (they had 700.000+ installations), they were compatible with lots of headsets (I remember VRideo being one of the first non-gaming app for GearVR), they raised a huge investment (2 million dollars!), they were super-cool… nonetheless, they’re closing.
As a startupper, I’m really sad about it. When we start our startup journey, we know that we have 90% possibilities of failing, of becoming part of the startup cemetery, just another post on /r/shutdown; but we hope to be in the other 10% and to become rich successful doing what we love doing in life. Sadly most of the times the big day arrives and you have to close: I’m sure VRideo guys have fighted to make their company survive, but in the end they had to admit the inevitable.
VRideo has been one of the company that has helped in shaping the future of virtual reality: we’re in a big hype moment and everyone one of us is trying to put new ideas into the system, to make this technology set a step further in the right direction towards its brillant future. It was a super-interesting video app, but I think that having big competitors like Youtube has surely not helped them.
It reminds me of another little hero app: Convrge, a nice VR social app that closed because companies like Facebook started doing VR social apps by themselves.
Wish VRideo guys to create another startup and to continue believing in making this beautiful technology better every day. Come on guys, you’re great and we all know it.
The ghost howls 
23 November 2016 at 4:50
Thanks for the sentiment! The Vrideo team definitely appreciates it.
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23 November 2016 at 10:04
Glad to know it… I’m very honoured of your comment 🙂
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30 November 2016 at 3:09
Sad to see it go. What would help is having Vrideo discuss what worked and didnt work so the VR community can learn from the wins and stumbling blocks encountered. Do you think they publish something?
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30 November 2016 at 11:04
I don’t think they’ll publish something like that for now… I think they’re too sad. But hopefully when they’ll recover, they’ll give us a deeper insight of the problem they had.
I think that they highlighted that the biggest problem was that they were competing against big companies like Youtube and Facebook, that with more money and a huge user-base would have stolen completely VRideo market. Venture capitalists saw this problem and decided not giving them another round of investment, because VC won’t invest on a company that is going to lose customers in the long term. Their company had a big cost to keep all the platform on (keeping and streaming videos requires a big cloud power and so money), so they finished the previous investment money and then closed.
I think that the lesson is: don’t start a VR service that existing big companies could steal you easily. So, for example, if you start the Spotify of VR, one day will come that Spotify will enter the market and take your customers.
But they’re super-cool and I hope they’ll use their expertise to create another startup.
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