Friends of Net4TV | About ImageMagick

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Dear ImageMagick Users

ImageMagick allows anyone with WebTV to edit photos and create banners and animated GIFs. Because of the unique nature of ImageMagick, it is very difficult to support financially.

We are working now on the process of making Image Magick a pay service. We have to do this to try to avoid having to shut it down completely.

The problem that's forcing us to do this is that Image Magick is a very expensive program to run. Our largest and fastest server is running it, and can't be used for anything else because of the processing power that IM requires.

Even more of the cost comes from the bandwidth. Right now it uses over 30 Gigabytes of bandwidth a month (and that's for about 1,200 users total per month, with about 250 of them the heaviest users). By comparison, Net4TV itself (including Net4TV Voice, Chat4TV, all of our games, and everything else we do) serves over 130,000 users per month on 18-20 Gigabytes of bandwidth.

We know that a lot of people rely on ImageMagick, and we don't want it to have to go away. We've tried to find someone else who would be willing to host it, and would be happy to just turn it over to them, but we haven't been able to.

As soon as we get the work done for usernames/passwords and for maintenance of the membership records, we will be offering subscriptions on a 3-month trial basis. It's mainly a trial for us -- we don't know if enough people would be willing to pay $5 a month for IM to make it self-supporting. If there aren't, we won't be able to keep it running. If it can pay for itself, then even if we were to go away, we would probably be able to get someone to keep it going.

We will guarantee that ImageMagick will be available during the trial period, excluding periodic maintenance. If we cancel the trial period, we will refund the pro-rated amount of the subscription. It's very important to us that you get what you pay for. Too many Internet companies have taken people's money and have gone out of business. We aren't that kind of people, and we won't do it.

We want to be clear that any donation given under the "Friends of Net4TV" will NOT count toward a subscription to ImageMagick. So, if you are an ImageMagick user and you can't afford to donate to Net4TV's free sites and subscribe to ImageMagick, please wait a while until our subscription service for IM is ready.

If you do want to donate through our "Friends of Net4TV" program and you want to subscribe to ImageMagick, we encourage you to do so. Subscribing to ImageMagick does nothing to support the rest of Net4TV because it is so expensive. ImageMagick must become self-sustaining, otherwise it will bring the rest of Net4TV down.