Microsoft Soapbox Beta
after signing up for Microsoft’s supposed YouTube-competitor soapbox - which is currently still in closed beta - several weeks ago, my account finally got approved today. seems the recent YouTube-aquisition stimulated the soapbox-team to get a move on. buzz among bloggers is increasing, as on10 - another Microsoft-asset - gave away 10.000 invites two days ago. in terms of features, soapbox tries to stay as close as possible to the market-leader, only adding minor improvements like tagging of clips. video-quality seems to be slightly better than we are used to, at least for some movies. quick-jumping to parts of the video not yet downloaded actually works (which is a great plus). interestingly, soapbox uses ActiveX-controls to integrate Windows Media Player for video-streaming when run on Internet Explorer (other browsers rely on the Flash-plugin as usual).
as has been pointed out many times before, the technical challenge in building a YouTube-clone-competitor isn’t that big at all. the real question is if Microsoft will be able to build a community around its social video-service - a community large enough to draw attention and video-uploads from YouTube. leveraging its Live Spaces-community of currently more than 130mio users, I think Microsoft’s position ain’t too bad.
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