Vrideo, one of the first 360 degree video studios in the modern era of virtual reality (VR), has announced the closing of operations. Following the launch of Vrideo’s official Oculus Rift application back in May 2016, the studio claims over 700,000 installs of the software had been achieved. Sadly, this wasn’t enough to secure a future for the studio amongst fierce competition.
“With only $2 million [USD] raised, we’ve accomplished all this up against competitors that have three to 50 times (!) our funding. In fact, we often joke about the fact that we have more apps than we do team members. Unfortunately, though, we’ve now stretched this modest funding as far as it could take us, especially in light of the rising costs associated with our growth,” reads an official blog post from Alex Rosenfeld, representing the studio. “We’d also like to thank all the users who have downloaded our apps and viewed content on our platform. Your enthusiasm has kept us motivated through many late nights and long weekends. Finally, we’d like to thank the investors and advisors who have supported us as we ventured out into a very nascent and unproven industry.”
Vrideo was a popular immersive video platform amongst early adopters of modern VR, offering stereoscopic and 4K video content, as well as later moving into WebVR. Following successful launches on Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift, Vrideo also recently arrived on PlayStation VR.
“The past few years have been a wild ride. When we first started working on Vrideo, Facebook hadn’t yet acquired Oculus, Sony hadn’t announced “Project Morpheus,” and Google wasn’t even talking about VR. It’s been a privilege to play a role, however small, in the emergence of this new medium. We’ll be rooting for all of you who continue to carry it forward,” concludes Rosenfeld.
The studio is encouraging users of Vrideo to reach out their team via an official support e-mail address, support@vrideo.com, for any concerns they may have. VRFocus will keep you updated with any future endeavours in VR from the team at Vrideo.