VidNet

VidNet is a video-sharing website based in the Philippines, with international operations in Singapore, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Founded by Eric Santiago and John Bianchi in 1998, it was originally launched as an online music video streaming platform, but expanded in 2000 to include the ability of uploading user-generated videos and social features (such as likes and dislikes, commenting and sharing).

As of 2019, over 20 billion videos have been uploaded to the site, while the first 75 were uploaded when during its first month when it introduced the ability to upload videos on the website in 2000.

Development (1993-1998)
Two wealthy men named Eric Santiago and John Bianchi worked at MTV Asia from 1993 until 1995. At the time when the Internet was starting to become widespread in other parts of the world, Santiago pitched an idea to MTV Asia on creating an online music video platform. However, because the adoption of the Internet was in its infancy at the time, MTV Asia rejected the idea. Both Santiago and Bianchi left MTV Asia and immigrated to the United States to work with RealNetworks in 1996. One year after they worked with RealNetworks, they went back to the Philippines to continue development for VidNet until its launch on May 7, 1998.

Launch (1998-2000)
Originally launched as an online music video on-demand platform on May 7, 1998, the first music video to be premiered on VidNet was Massive Attack's "Teardrop".

Initially, users were required to download and install the latest version of RealPlayer in order to view videos on the website. Later, support for Sorenson Video were added in late 1998, QuickTime Streaming in 1999 and Windows Media Video in 2000.

The servers initially ran on Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 Server SP3 operating system, which they're equipped with an Intel Pentium Pro processor, 4GB of server RAM and two hundred 5GB SCSI hard drives. In 1999, the website bought fifteen Mac Server G3 450s and twenty Pentium III Xeon 500-based server racks in order to increase its capacity of videos that are stored on the server and to allow to transcode to other formats besides RealVideo, such as Sorenson Video, QuickTime Streaming and Windows Media Video.

At the time when VidNet was launched, videos that were uploaded on the website only played back at either a resolution of 80x60 (60p) or 160x120 (120p) at 12 to 15 frames per second.

Expansion (2000-2008)
VidNet started its first major upgrade in the year 2000. The user interface was overhauled, more streaming formats were added and upload for user-created videos plus social features (such as likes/dislikes and commenting) were added. The maximum resolution was later increased to 320x240 (240p).

The first user-created video to be uploaded on VidNet was "The Server Tour" by Santiago and Company on March 12, 2000. It gained 30 million views, 250,000 likes and 1,000 dislikes and 12 million comments as of April 24, 2020.

Later on the same year, VidNet launched a premium membership service called VidNet Premium. The service allowed to users to upload longer videos (longer than five minutes), playing videos at a higher resolution and early access to new features. It was discontinued in 2005 when VidNet started to put both banner ads and video ads before the beginning of each video. Prior to its discontinuation in 2005, the service costs $15/month or $30/year.

In 2002, VidNet started to use Flash as the primary media player for the website. In addition to that, the player's aspect ratio now supports 16:9 and 16:10, plus the maximum resolution was later updated to 480p.

In 2005, VidNet experimentally adding 720p HD playback to their media player. In order to play HD video, an Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor, 512MB or RAM, and a particular graphics card like NVIDIA's GeForce 6 series. 720p was later officially supported in late 2005 and 1080p was later added sometime in 2006.

Rise in popularity (2008-present)
In 2008, VidNet celebrated its 10th anniversary. An event was held at the World Trade Center in Manila, Philippines on May 7, 2008 featuring some of the best artists/bands who performed on that event. On the same year, Mark Sato became the current CEO of VidNet. The event was streamed live for the first on the website.

Around 2010, VidNet started to use HTML5 video player as the default playback format for the website.

In 2011, 4K video support was introduced, but because the market of 4K content and devices were still in its infancy, it was limited to 1080p on playback. However in 2014, 4K playback was now enabled, but only in HTML5.

In 2012, prior to the passing of Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 in the Philippines, the site was temporarily shut down worldwide for a few days and all of the employees including its CEO and founders walked out and protested against the anti-cybercrime law.

Around 2018, VidNet signed a 5-year deal with FUNimation to distribute and release anime to VidNet in the United States.

Recently on December 2019, Mark Sato criticized about the current state of YouTube. He stated the following:"'YouTube is already worst at its existence. We're tired of your false copyright claims, demonetization, moderation, community guidelines, and even your trying to set random videos 'for kids'. We are trying to be fair here. We are not robots or a daycare center. We respect freedom and privacy.'"

2005 data wipe
Sometime around the March 3, 2005, a user named JohnSchwarz, whose real name is Dominic Becker (German techno DJ), sent a message to the support e-mail of VidNet. The message reads:"'Greetings staff of VidNet,""I want to negotiate to you. This is an urgent message. You have 5 minutes to answer this message. If you don't answer there will be consequences.""If you gave me a million Euros, we won't do anything to you. But, if you don't, we will track you down and wipe all of your data. You promise that?'""- JohnSchwarz (translated from Leet)"At the time Dominic was residing in the Philippines (where the website is based in), he was able to disguise himself as Pennywise and entered the VidNet headquarters when the staff refused to reply to him. He sneaked into the server room and executed a command to wipe the entire drive. When one of the staff noticed it (whose identity remains anonymous), Dominic pushed the person when he stopped the command at around 75%. Because of that, everyone witnessed him, as he ran away from the building. The police couldn't find him anywhere (even inside his house) until he was found in a nightclub in Cebu, Philippines. Dominic was declared persona non grata in the country and deported back to Germany. Later, his account was banned on April 7, 2005.

Almost every video that were hosted on VidNet were deleted and no backups were found. It wasn't until VidNet contacted Jason Scott from the Internet Archive if they have a backup of all the videos that were hosted on the website prior to the incident. Jason Scott was able to ship the backup to VidNet and thanked them.

The backups that were sent from the Internet Archive were stored on fifty StorageTek T9840A "Eagle" tapes, ten LTO-1 tapes and five LTO-2 tapes, totaling to around 3TB of the backup. The process of restoring them wasn't started until May 2, 2005, because they have to earn enough money to buy the necessary equipment to backup and restore from tape storage. The process was finally done in four weeks, with additional six weeks for reuploading.

However, an exorbitantly small percentage of the videos that were hosted prior to the incident are still lost to this day. This formed a division inside VidNet named Obscure Video Recovery Team (OVRT), which tracks down the last of the lost videos from VidNet. As of 2020, 346 videos were found and reuploaded to the website. It was unknown that how many videos were lost when VidNet nearly wiped out. The incident was considered the dark age in VidNet history.

Block in Germany
In 2008, according to a German court in Hamburg, VidNet could be held liable for damages when it hosts copyrighted videos without the copyright holder's permission. As a result, music videos for major label artists on YouTube, as well as many videos containing background music, are geoblocked in Germany since the end of March 2008 after the previous agreement had expired and negotiations for a new license agreement were stopped. On June 30, 2010, VidNet won a partial victory against GEMA in a state court in Munich, which ruled that they could not be held liable for such damages.

In July 2010, the higher regional court of Hamburg also rejected GEMA's claim for €1.6 million in damages.

In 2011, VidNet and GEMA, who represents 70,000 composers and publishers, reached a settlement agreement. The settlement sum is unknown.

Notable videos
* denotes that any video that were uploaded prior to March 12, 2000 were uploaded by the record company and not the uploader