Kim Dotcom’s new secure file-storage and file-sharing venture Mega has now officially launched on a surge of interest. The timing of the launch, 6:48 a.m. New Zealand time on January 20, coincides with the one-year anniversary of the raid on his home by New Zealand authorities after the closure of Megaupload, another file-sharing and file-storage site that was seized by U.S. authorities for copyright violations.
Meanwhile, some 10 minutes after the launch, it looks like the site is generating a surge of initial interest.
Later, Dotcom reported that sign-ups were coming at a rate of thousands per minute.
The site opened up for early access yesterday, and now everyone can go to Mega to sign up and use the service, with a basic, free offering of 50GB of storage, plus three pricing tiers with additional storage and bandwidth capacity. This is being resold by partners of Mega, which include Instra, as well as EuroDNS and Digiweb.
In the hours leading up to launch — as Kim Dotcom promoted this kooky pop video by Jayme Guitierrez called “Death to the Dinosaur”, featuring Kim Dotcom — there was some speculation about whether the site would make it, with the holding page timing out unless you typed in the address using the “https” secure prefix. All seems to be working fine so far, however.
Mega Ltd, the company that runs Mega, plans to expand its offering in a few months with the launch of Megabox for streaming music. Think of this as laying the groundwork for that effort.
There is an event taking place to celebrate the launch in about 13 hours. We’re aiming to run a stream of that event here on TC so watch this space.