14 DAY TRIAL // Bing has been through a lot of changes lately, one of which included the addition of video-enabled homepages for some major markets around the world.
The feature has been available for the users of Bing in the United States for a while now, and is now present on the search engine's homepage in Australia and the UK as well.
Users in Australia have double reasons to rejoice, since the new feature was put in place for them only a few hours after Bing Australia came out of beta, it seems.
Bing was already known for the great photo-of-the-day backgrounds that it has been serving to people all around the world, but the HTML5 video background image it has now in place for Australian and UK users seems even more interesting than that.
Of course, those who would like to enjoy the new experience on their PCs have to have an HTML5 capable web browser.
The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari will certainly do the job, although Microsoft suggests Internet Explorer for that.
Today, users in these countries were served with a White-lined leaf frog crawling up a branch, in Manu National Park, Peru, though it seems that the replaying short clip was packed with a series of goodies that might not appear visible right from the start:
Use the handy hotspots to navigate the tropical image and reveal information about all things amphibian, including the frightening fact that the prettiest frogs are often the deadliest and a link to a video on diamagnetism, a peculiar phenomenon that enables frogs the ability to levitate in strong magnetic fields.
We should expect the feature to be rolled-out to Bing in more countries around the world, though it comes as a surprise that Microsoft decided to go for a market-to-market deployment.
On the other hand, this is not the only service/feature from the Redmond company to be available only for a limited number of countries.