Microsoft To Launch New Video Service!
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
The reason due to which Microsoft has stepped into the video sharing/hosting service is because their rivals (in video hosting) have gained extreme popularity and are doing extremely good in this particular field. According to Nielsen/Netrating, YouTube (the leader in video hosting) got more than 30 million visitors in august. Similary, Google Video Hosting service also gained lot of popularity recently.
Microsoft is researching more on how they can use Soapbox as one of their earning source through advertising.
Apart, from this Rafe Needleman of Cnet got the invitation to test the service (one of the lucky chaps) and he thinks that SOAPBOX is not at all a YouTube killer. He says this because he says that the service is feature less and will find difficulty in attracting the users. He says that there is hardly any sparking feature whose light or spark will attract the users. It has limit of 100 MB per video just similar to YouTube.
However, one good thing is that SOAPBOX will be supported by all major browser including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Apple Safari. In case of Internet Explorer it will display the video content with the help of Windows Media Player plugin while in other browsers it will make use of Macromedia's Flash technology.
The homepage of SOAPBOX displays the demo of the video but it fails to shows the percentage of the video which gets buffered. This is one handy feature and I think Microsoft engineers must work on it and must allow users to see about the amount of video content transfered or buffered.
One strange thing was that Microsoft did'nt release this product under it's new brand that is LIVE. But, when anyone tries to request the invitation of the service (Yes, the service is in beta and is based on invitation) then it says Windows Live above the page where one can request for the invitation.
Let's see where SOAPBOX will get the place in the already over crowded department of the web as there are already many big players in the field of video hosting. I guess that Microsoft can make use of it's popular customer base of Windows Live Spaces and can attract those users to upload their videos at SOAPBOX.
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