MediaMax is dead, The Linkup is dead, Streamload is dead

by Brad Linder Jul 11th 2008

Once upon a time there was a company called Streamload that let users upload huge media files to a web site fo sharing with their friends. Eventually Streamload changed its name to MediaMax and offered pretty much the same service. This year the company changed its name again, this time to The Linkup and launched a new business model: a social network based around online file storage and sharing.

Apparently the whole social network thing didn't really pan out, as The Linkup has announced plans to kill the service on August 8th. The company has posted a message on its homepage stating that it will no longer accept new uploads or new accounts. It will also no longer charge current customers. If you've got any media stored at The Linkup, you'll probably want to make sure you've got a backup before August 8th, because at that point the company will delete your files.

According to the note, The Linkup had problems transfering user files from MediaMax. That's kind of an understatement. What actually happened was that the company deleted nearly half of its user files. Many were recoverable, but some were not.

Did you use The Linkup, MediaMax or Streamload? What was your experience like? Will you miss this service or just move on to other online storage sites?

[via GigaOm]

Tags: file-sharing, file-storage, mediamax, online-storage, storage, streamload, the-linkup

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

cowboy_k said 1:54PM on 7-11-2008

When cleaning out my work computer shortly before quitting my job, I uploaded my "personal" files (iTunes library, personal e-mail and documents, etc. - I know, it's a work computer, shouldn't have been there in the first place, but stuff accumulates after 10 years in the same place) to a free account on MediaMax. I didn't have the space to download it on my home PC (old computer, tiny hard drive), so I let it sit for a number of months on MediaMax's servers. When I finally tried to download my data after upgrading my home PC, I discovered that I couldn't download anything larger than 10MB without going to a paid account. Would have been nice if they had mentioned that when I was uploading the files in the first place - felt a bit "bait and switched" (I know, read the fine print - my fault, but still). So I upgraded to a paid account, and started downloading all my files. Or at least I tried to - there were a lot of files that turned up 404 when I tried to download them. Apparently, there had been some sort of server catastrophe in the intervening months that caused some data loss - but I had to go through their blog to find that out, I don't think I was ever notified directly. And finally, of the files that did download, a surprising number of them were the wrong files - a lot of MP3s that had the right filename (that I had uploaded them under), but were completely different songs, wrong file length, etc. Somehow I was getting someone else's files. I tried talking to support a few times, got a "try again in a few hours, see if it works then" and not much else. I canceled my paid plan a little while later, after giving up hope of getting my data back. I'm not terribly surprised that they're shutting down now.

bdgbill said 4:52PM on 7-11-2008

I bailed when they changed from Streamload to MediaMax. I was actually surprised to hear they were still in buisness in any form.

The MediaMax version of the website had some of the worst navigation I have ever seen on the web. Lots of timeouts and Java nonsense.

The only website I trust with my data long term is Flickr.

Rick said 12:18AM on 7-12-2008

Signed up for Streamload, because it was the service of choice for users swapping Old Time Radio mp3's. Stayed with the service when it switched to MediaMax. Used it for backup and sharing of photos in addition to OTR files. MediaMax was horrible to use -- very slow, terrible navigation, uploaded files took forever to post, and the download manager hung up more often than it worked. I never received a notification that MediaMax was changing to The Linkup, so I was surprised by the announcement that TLU was closing. Went to find my photos -- nada. My account was still there, but it had absolutely no files of any kind. Hundreds of photos and thousands of OTR files just gone. Please let me know if there will be a class action lawsuit. The people who ran this "business" should never be allowed to work again -- poor vision and totally incompetent at everything they tried to do. I should have been more discerning and dropped my subscription long ago, but then you expect services to get better over time, not worse. What a bunch of doofuses.

Ozmarcus said 9:22AM on 8-08-2008

We will certainly be looking at taking action -please email us if you are looking at it too.

We used this service to host clients files for streaming on to their websites, artwork files, backups etc etc, It was promoted as being for that very purpose among other things.

We couldnt get in to our account to download files as they instructed ( because they stuffed our password) - and they havent responded to many emails since for the last month, We get routine emails from them telling us to go to our account and download files before they turn it off - however we have no damn files in there to get!!

It is likely that there will be some action to recover the tens of thousands of dollars of our work - however like a lot of net based businesses - there is no contact details, names or phone numbers, if someone can fill in the contact details for us all that would be great.

Murtadh Altarouti said 8:45AM on 7-12-2008

I used it for a short time, but because it wasn't a a factor for me; I stopped using it after they deleded my files and moved to the linkup.
Anyway now I'm using humyo.com which I think it's much better

cub3 said 10:16PM on 7-12-2008

I also bailed out after it went from streamload to mediamax, they lost nearly all my files but were able to recover them.
Their costumer support was and is horrendous. They are mean and can't seem to help people.
They had a nice idea but because they were hungry for cash they failed. and thanks to Filesharing site they lost a lot of their costumers. im happy they should go out of business.

Grant said 8:34PM on 7-15-2008

This is disappointing. Perhaps there is some hope for these users at other services. ElephantDrive is trying to connect with The Linkup to try to keep users data available - check this post out:

http://elephantdrive.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/help-users-migrate-from-thelinkup-to-elephantdrive/

mayka said 8:01AM on 7-16-2008

Yes so I have found you all for the same reason you probably looked around for answers. THEY LOST YEARS OF MY FILES GOING FROM MEDIAMAX TO LINKUP AND NO WAY TO RETRIEVE THEM. Yes, PLEASE let me know if anyone is thinking of taking them to court, I was a paid subscriber for years!!! this is not right.

RobinInSeoul said 3:08PM on 7-16-2008

Yeah, I lost a bunch too. Nothing really important, luckily, but I was using the service to host photos on websites and such. A big nuisance, for sure.

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Joshua Issac said 10:16AM on 7-18-2008

I used Streamload to store lots of files I considered important when I was cleaning up my computer. I was disappointed when I found out that MediaMax would not let me download anything more than 10MB at once. Then today (18 Jul 08), I was checking my e-mails on my old e-mail address and found the e-mail telling me about the closure of MediaMax and that all my files were going to be deleted. I followed the link to see that Linkup was also dying. I started to use OmniDrive for online storage soon after Streamload became MediaMax.

Latrice Davis said 2:38PM on 7-22-2008

I'm also another dissatisfied customer. I was smart enough to save my JPEGs on my hard drive, so I was able to move them elsewhere. At this point, all I want to know is when I'm going to get a refund because their customer service was beyond pitiful.

wclay said 10:40AM on 7-27-2008

I am suing Steve Iverson and The Linkup. I paid in advance for a year and got half a year of much less than nothing. I know of writers who lost novels; legal cases that lost evidence and employees who lost projects--the loss of which permanently damaged their job status. Foolish, they may have been, to trust The Linkup, but TRUST they did. If you would like to be part of a class-action lawsuit email me at to.geoff@shaw.ca

john said 5:59PM on 7-28-2008

man this is horrible i had streamload then when they switch over to mediamax it sucked and now its alllll gone this sucks!!! i miss it and i was gonna get my account back up too!!! damn!!!

John H said 5:59PM on 7-28-2008

This is "The other John Hood"

I am not related in any way to the John Hood who worked at Mediamax/TheLinkUp. I write reviews of free and open software and webware for my site Best of Free Software - http://www.jhoodsoft.org.

My only relationship to Mediamax/TheLinkUp is that I am also a disgruntled customer who also lost data. Please tell people to stop sending emails of complaint to me. I can do nothing for them except shout "amen."

I am now a happy customer of www.humyo.com

Thank you,

John Hood-not-the-MediaMax-one

Kathy Moore said 9:33AM on 8-03-2008

Streamload became MediaMax became the LinkUp; but Streamload also powered something called KeepVault, does anyone know the status of THAT "service"? And behind all of these was something called Nirvanix. Are there OTHERS out there that we don't yet know of? Is anybody taking these people to COURT? How about the FEDERAL Attorney General?

I signed up for Streamload over two years ago; it never worked properly; the in-site search frequently could not locate my files, even if they were there; I had to laboriously search for important files manually.

After serious problems with Streamload, news came of the change to Mediamax. I wrote and said, I like the Streamload concept, I like thumbnails, why don't you just FIX it instead of throwing it out to do something else? I CHOSE this system over others because that's what I WANTED, and now you're CHANGING it? And I have no say? And will you lose or destroy my files in the migration? They replied that they HAD to change the system, and that my files were perfectly safe. Famous last words. Not at all.

After the big file migration to Mediamax, upwards of 70% of the file url's in my Mediamax account, transferred from Streamload, were connected to NOTHING. Massive amounts of my irreplaceable "safe and secure" files were dead and gone. So bad was THIS new system that the Mediamax team even BUILT INTO IT a very special "error message" which said "Oops! We've had a slight hiccup!", and this message appeared EVERY time a file url was clicked but the file was missing.

Mediamax refused to account for the files that were gone. I had about 20 gigs of files in there, so I began to keep track of destroyed files by print-screening the open page of url's in Mediamax, then red-circling those that were damaged or missing due to "Hiccups". To do this for the whole 20 gigs would have been a hopeless job, not to say a full-time job.

I therefore did this for just a mere fraction of my account. I would do it whenever I had to login to search for something. In this way, I verified that Mediamax: (1) destroyed ALL my personal and professional legal (study) research files, representing months of sitting in the law library taking notes -- that's months of actual academic work in the GARBAGE; I had in fact signed up for Mediamax to replace a RUNBOX.com combination e-mail/storage account that I had PAID for -- another scammer company which marketed their unique email account as HAVING a separate section for file storage, and who then LOST all my irreplaceable files. ALL. RUNBOX was really clever; they marketed themselves to lawyers and law students because of the file storage, and THEN they had no backups on the storage and lost it all. I would literally sit in the law library with RUNBOX open, and then later with Streamload open, and download my law periodicals, and case law and then upload to Runbox, and then later to Streamload, and then to Mediamax. ALL GONE! Two years of work in the toilet.

(2) Mediamax destroyed ALL my personal legal files that were stored regarding a labour suit worth over $50,000.00 and likely much more, and those files included scanned evidentiary documents, draft legal proceedings, correspondence with all parties concerned including government;

(3) Mediamax destroyed all my intellectual property (I'm a writer) including newly drafted manuscripts with graphics that were underway [non-fiction] -- so, all my work and new research was thrown in the GARBAGE inside Mediamax;

(4) Streamload had also offered the possibility to back up web sites. The concept was really neat: you feed in a url and Streamload would reach out and copy the web site and store it for you. I build web sites, I had no computer of my own; I backed everything up in Streamload: GONE. All my web sites, including a site I worked on for 10 months, not yet ready for publication, GONE; and the originals LOST because of changes to Geocity.

(5) Mediamax destroyed countless scans that I had paid for at $1 a scan, plus computer rental time (I didn't have my own PC or laptop then, so Mediamax was that much more important) -- they killed SCANS for:

(a) documents regarding my employment on different contracts: i.e., scans of my work time sheets; my pay stubs, my pay cheques, my work notes from my shifts;

(b) all of my digital and digitally converted photographs -- I had PAID a photo lab to TRANSFER hundreds of photos from old FILM to CD and then uploaded them to Streamload-Mediamax for "safe and secure" backup. ALL GONE! And the original CDs are now missing, someone stole the envelope of photos and NEGATIVES off the bed in my room in a student housing co-op; and the CD's ultimately also disappeared, god knows where, so here I am, grateful to Streamload-Mediamax for having NOT provided their alleged "safe, secure, RELIABLE" backup.

(c) among the losses, and I'm sure that probably hundreds of thousands of Streamload-Mediamax victims are in the same boat: every last picture of the family CAT that we had for nine years, GONE. All family photos, GONE. All vacations, all pictures of the house, travels, GONE.

(d) all my scans of books and articles that I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s, at $1 a page, in addition to the complexity of having ordered and paid for photocopies of them at 40c a page from the archives of the National Library in Ottawa -- all those scans GONE inside the giant "Hiccup" that was Medimax;

(e) all my personal legal business regarding insurance, employment insurance, dealings with government departments; copies of important legal proceedings at Federal Court of Canada and related lower tribunals concerning over $45,000 + interest owed to me by the government: GONE.

(f) EVIDENCE in the form of scans converted to PDFs -- being documents of others, sent to me, and useful in Court: GONE.

(g) detailed historical documents painstakingly researched, written, and illustrated with original PHOTOGRAPHS, uploaded in Word and in PDF format, all GONE;

... so much is GONE, that I could go ON and ON...

But suffice it to say that there are 20 GIGS OF "GONE", that was entirely irreplaceable, and destroyed largely because of an incompetent migration from one incompetent system to another (from Streamload to Mediamax) by the conmen and incompetents at Mediamax.

I emailed them from the Streamload days onward about the problems, and they were NEVER EVER able to account to me for ONE single url of ONE single file that was "hiccuped", destroyed and lost. They could not explain why the search could NOT find some files that were there.

Finally, they just stopped answering, and then after a few months of silence, because I had sent them attached print-screens red-circled witih all my dead urls in Mediamax, they sent me an invitation to read their blog.

Of even MORE concern, it became apparent that these guys were collaborating with cyberstalkers who have been following me around since 1997. Mediamax were apparently informing the stalkers of the IP addresses of rental computers around Montreal that I would use to log in from.

They apparently in a specific case that I know of also provided to the stalkers the actual scans of a postal money order that I had uploaded, so that the recipient could act on this fact in advance of being presented with it. I had purchased the money order just before store closing at 9:00 pm; I had then walked to a computer center to rent a termina where I SCANNED both sides of the money order and its receipt and UPLOADED them at 10:30 pm into my Mediamax account. I then went home to bed. I was awakened the next morning by a person at my door, the intended recipient of the money order who had NO IDEA that the money order was intended or coming, and he showed up looking for it; and I know for a fact that he was connected to the gang of cyberstalkers who are following me around. So, how did HE know, OVERNIGHT, about this money order? The post office didn't know who it was intended for, I purchased it blank. I filled it in at the computer center; only the SCANS inside Mediamax disclosed the purpose of the money order, and who it was intended for.

All of which proves that the so-called "safe, secure, reliable " backup in Mediamax was never any such thing, and certainly not private.

These guys are not just storage scammers, they are people who can cause you significant damage if they feel like it.

I think it's very important now, because of their malevolent presence on the Internet, that before you deal with ANY online storage company, before you upload your files, do an in-depth check to find out who they are.

It would be extremely important for the major online and print computer magazines to take these guys on and launch an editorial investigation into their corrupt activities.

* * *

I just found a news link from 2005 that connects Streamload with a Texas company called MEEDIO:

http://freshnews.com/cgibin/jsj_news/viewnews.cgi?action=one&cat=2&article_ID=25268

"Streamload and Meedio Introduce Unlimited Capacity for Your Digital Media" -- "Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Meedio develops innovative software for digital home entertainment and automation systems. Meedio provides a robust middleware platform, a suite of plug-in applications, a customizable user interface, and an extensible media library. Meedio's software is enjoyed by users in 41 countries and is licensed to resellers, OEMs, and ISVs worldwide. Visit Meedio online at www.meedio.com."

I clicked into http://www.meedio.com/ to find a page stating they have sold their "techology" to Yahoo, which unfortunately, they allege, did not also buy their existing "products" -- i.e., the SERVICES that meedio customers were signed up and paying for. Now, that's odd. Yahoo bought technology but didn't care to assume the actual customer base?

* * *

Here's another happy Streamload-Mediamax victim:
http://alchemistpoonam.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/streamloadmediamaxlinkup-cheats-and-offenders-on-web/

* * *

In sheer desperation, I just signed up and started using MEDIAFIRE.com for storage. I have not as yet been able to link Medafire to Streamload, but as Streamload did business in Texas with Meedio... I wonder about the name similarity...

elliotte said 10:11AM on 8-04-2008

I moved to http://www.tilidom.com and that's pretty good!
they offer 1 Gb free.

Greg Scott said 7:41PM on 8-06-2008

The Media Max Icon still loads in my Tray, but when i go to uninstall the software, I can't find anything in my installed programs that sounds like them. Does anybody know what the software is called and how to remove it from my PC?
Thanks

Alicia said 9:30AM on 8-08-2008

My computer was crashing so I bought a new one, I used Media Max to save all my files (pictures, documents, songs, etc) so that I could setup my new computer and transfer the files over. I used a free account since I wasn't using it long term. Ironically the day after the last day to get your files from Media Max I tried to get my files. I missed it by one day! I contacted Media Max and they said I was sent some email alerting me to get my files. I received no such email. I lost pictures of my only child from his birth through age 5. Something should be done about this. Those pictures are priceless. I will NEVER get them back. Granted I have others that I had saved on discs already or had used a regular camera, but how does a company simply not care about these files? I am appalled at the lack of ethics Media Max/The Link Up have displayed.

mav2k said 8:16AM on 8-21-2008

as a computer software engineer i often found i had to take a mountain of cd's to every place i worked as most useful utillities are scattered on disks full of usless junk. a few years ago i found the streamload site and it revolutionised my working efficiency. no longer would i be a pack horse for my disks or be crippled by the inevitable scratched or cracked cd a million miles away from home. i could store the most usefull of applications and delete and replace as i saw fit. its a shame there time has come to an end. i will miss the sites and the team that made it possible......

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