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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.

rev2.org - a site dedicated to web2.0-news - didn’t come to my attention until their recent - very extensive - company-profile of YouTube. covering the company’s history, lack-of-a business-model, legal threats and technological background (don’t get me wrong, this is really an interesting read!), the article makes me crave for more in-depth profiles on other companies (compare this MySpace-roundup, published on Valleywag)!

ex-Rocketboom vlogging-celebrity Amanda Congdon launched her new video-project AmandaAcrossAmerica today. during the next five weeks, AAA will cover Amanda’s roadtrip in a hybrid car from NY to LA. sponsered by the National Resources Defense Counsil and Environmental Countdown, the show will take advantage of all the web2.0-tech we get to love: besides the obvious video-feed there is a flickr-feed, a map-feed and a wiki asking for audience-involvement & -meetups. bon voyage!

Robert Scoble links to neave.tv, an innovative flash-based website mashing up creative video content from YouTube, Google Video and Blip.tv. awesome clips (check out Adam Freeland - we want your soul), gorgeous interface & fullsize video spiced up with some special-fx.

Jason Calacanis rolls the drums for Netscape.com, which has introduced flash-based video on their site today. and rightly so, since Netscape is the first among premiere social newssites to integrate YouTube-like video-uploads. while video-quality is similar to established competitors (read: not very good), Netscape shines with ease-of-access: videoclips appear folded right inside the news-listing and can be watched without refreshing the page. hosted videos can easily be syndicated on other websites. Netscape Video is currently available to Netscape Anchors only, but should go public very soon.

while I like the idea, I wonder weither Netscape’s contributors will primarily use video to spice up news-stories, or if Netscape becomes a place for self-contained video-uploads as well, similar to YoutTube.

update: NeoThoughts has some interesting info on this, quoting Calacanis:

“syndicated video is NOT a business. It is a feature. YouTube is not yet a business, it’s just a feature. As they start to do content deals with right holders, or build out their community, they will have a business. Flash video existed long before YouTube, they just did it better than anyone.”

ps: try this sample showcasing the iPod-arcade-games introduced yesterday

while Apple is almost certainly quite likely going to announce feature-movie downloads for the iTunes Music Store on next tuesdays special event, Amazon is first off the mark by having launched their movie download-service Unbox.com tonight. Unbox offers TV-episodes for $2 USD and movies in the range from $8 to 20$ for download, movies are also rented for $2 - $3 (that is for one playback!). according to TechCrunch, video is delivered in both a DVD-quality hi-res-file and a low-res version suitable for portable devices (both using DRM’ed Windows Media). Unbox.com is currently available to US-customers only.

in a recent post, Robert Scoble pointed to Stage6, a new video-portal by DivX.com. unlike its well known competitors YouTube, Google Video or Grouper (which was recently aquired by Sony for a unbelievable 65mio USD), Stage6 isn’t built on flash streaming-technology but requires a custom browser-plugin to utilize the DivX6-codec. around 1998, DivX was the first video-codec allowing the transfer of feature-length movies on the net (see Wikipedia). today, DivX and its opensource-cousin XviD are still the dominating codecs in movie-downloads. comparing Stage6 to YouTube & co., I found that:

• Stage6-videos generally are of much better audio- & video-quality - check out these widescreen-features from the sundance film-festival - it’s stunning! most videos are fine enough for fullscreen-replay, naturally at the expense of increased bandwidth
• switching between fulllscreen and embedded playback works seemless
• pre-buffering & connection-time are recognizably longer than with flash-based portals (about 20-30 seconds)
• all videos can be downloaded by a single-click - unfortunately, many portable video-players like the iPod can’t playback DivX-movies, which means additional transcoding-time coming along with some quality loss
• being just launched recently, Stage6′ is currently hosting only ~1.000 clips. featured shows like treehugger.tv, G4TV or CommandN are very geek-oriented & well-produced, but lack mass-appeal
• viral spread will be hampered severly by the lack of embedding clips into myspace or other websites. on the other hand: most people won’t embed content which requires visitors to install a third-party browse-plugin anyway

the plugin is available for most windows- and mac-browsers (manual install worked fine, autoinstall on Flock didn’t work for me). I’m afraid the requirement for an additional install will obscure Stage6, despite it’s superior video-quality. it remains to be seen when YouTube is going to increase encoding-quality (which should be easily possible, since flash itself is definitely capable of better encoding as to what we are used to right now).

until recently, integrating video into Wordpress was quite messy. Viper’s Video Quicktags is a neat Wordpress-plugin embedding video-content into the richtext-editor by a single click. Video Quicktags syndicates streaming video from YouTube, Google Video and iFilm as well as static quicktime-,avi-, mpeg-, wmv- and flv-files.

preview 0.0.1 of Elisa - an opensource media-center developed by fluendo - was just released yesterday. Elisa currently offers a basic feature-set - playback of audio, photos and video using the GStreamer multimedia framwork, support for infrared remote-controls and support for DLNA-compliant upnp-devices. integration of TV-adapters and PVR-functionality (personal [digital] video recorder is planned but not implemented yet. the most shining aspect of Elisa is its (her?) beautiful 3D-styled user-interface, which can be watched in action on this screencast (Java required).

while Elisa is under development, I recommend checking out MythTV (Linux) or MediaPortal (Windows), both being established and well-supported opensource PVR/media center-solutions.

without a doubt, todays hottest topic on the blogosphere was Amanda Congdon leaving rocketboom. rocketboom is (or was) probably the biggest success-story in the young history of video-podcasting. the geeky news-cast with mainstream-appeal founded by Amanda and her partner Andrew Baron attracted enough viewers to sell a week worth of advertisment for no less than 40.000 US$ on ebay. watching Amanda’s and reading Andrew’s statement I assume it’s safe to say the split happened in disagreement. without its anchor-woman, rocketboom will surely have a hard time…meanwhile Amanda is already wooed by Robert Scoble (ex-Microsoft, soon-to-be Podtech) and Jason Calacanis (AOL/Netscape)…

update: now scoble muses on hiring calacanis as well… don’t think so