Katch, a live video sharing and storage platform, announced today that it will stop archiving live videos April 22, and is shutting down for good on May 4.
Unable to secure capital, the company owners published a ‘Farewell to Katch’ announcement on Medium: “We got very, very close to a big round of funding with amazing investors. But in the end, we were unable to secure the financial resources we needed to continue.”
Katch sent an email to users today, outlining its shutdown schedule. According to the email, subscribers can transfer videos to YouTube or download .mp4 files of their videos to a hard drive for free. By tomorrow, users will no longer be able to save Periscope or Meerkat videos to the platform, and Katch will stop posting videos to Twitter and Facebook. Also, the #Katch hashtag will no longer work.
May 2 will be the last chance users have to export their videos to YouTube or download their archive. On May 4, all videos saved to the platform will be permanently deleted, and all remaining Katch services will be terminated.
In its farewell post on Medium, Katch notes that a small percentage of videos will not import properly with YouTube’s transcoding algorithms. Also, video comments won’t transfer to YouTube, but downloaded video archives will include comments in a text file.
“We won’t have time to make this perfect and we apologize in advance if it doesn’t do everything you need it to,” said Katch on Medium.
Just last month, the live video platform announced it had reached over a million indexed videos and launched a search function on its site. The Katch team shared a screen shot of its Google Analytics on Medium, showing its growth in active users over the last 30 days. Unfortunately, the numbers didn’t prove strong enough for investors.
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