Blending Soapbox into MSN Video

Sep 24, 2007 11:02 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has killed its YouTube clone. Soapbox on MSN Video, introduced at the end of 2006 as a potential YouTube killer, did not live to see its first year on the market and now is no more. But the Redmond company is by no means accepting the failure of Soapbox, and instead delivered an explanation revealing that it was nothing more than the natural trajectory and evolution of the online video sharing service to become an integer part of MSN Video. However, the most recent statistics involving the online video market indicate that Soapbox was going nowhere fast, and it just happened to be that it ended up on MSN Video.

"When going to soapbox.msn.com - you will be directed to MSN Video. Soapbox is now directly part of MSN Video. In the menu you will see a new addition of "Soapbox user videos" where you can access user generated content from Soapbox including your profile via a new drop down menu. Also: you will note that MSN Video now consumes the most out of the browser window instead of being a fixed width at the center," stated Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc.

"After working for several months, the Soapbox Team is proud to report - Soapbox is now fully integrated with MSN Video Beta. Soapbox is no longer a dedicated site, but is now a part of the next-generation of MSN Video Beta. If you take a look at the new site, you will see Soapbox User Videos is now a tab on the main MSN Video Beta navigation," added a member of the Soapbox Team.

Bundling Soapbox and MSN Video will do nothing to help Microsoft against Google's YouTube on the online video market. After acquiring YouTube, the Mountain View company also killed Google Video indicating its failure to attract an audience. Microsoft however is playing it safe and claims that Soapbox was heading for MSN Video all along, and that with the launch of MSN Video V4, that task is accomplished.

LeBlanc even enumerated some of the features of the new release: "Enhanced Copyright violation - Soapbox users will now be explicated told one of their videos has been flagged for copyright violation versus previously the video would simply not show up without any sort of message. Improved encoding time - previously, it took quite a bit of time to get a video completely uploaded to be embedded into a blog post. And the Mini-Showcase is a new area on the landing page where the video team editors can show you what's hot on the site."

What Microsoft is not telling users is the disastrous performance of both MSN Video and Soapbox. The Redmond company is at the bottom of the online video market with just 149 million videos served in July for a market share of 1.6%. In contrast, Google delivered almost 2.5 billion videos and has a share of 27.0%. Microsoft's online video properties failed to reach the 19 million unique visitors milestone having an Internet reach of just 10.5%. (The statistics were provided by Internet metrics company comScore and represent the data collected for the U.S.)