Google's YouTube is currently dominating the market of online video. But YouTube was the apex of the top online video properties, long before the Mountain View search giant paid no less than $1.5 billion in order to take it under the Google brand umbrella. Still, a new move by Microsoft is designed to challenge Google's domination with YouTube. The Redmond company showed little interest in acquiring YouTube in 2006, and opted instead for building a clone of the service. Towards the end of the past year, Soapbox on MSN Video came to life.
The service remained in a perpetual beta throughout its lifetime, and failed to make it to the one-year anniversary. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that the YouTube clone was dead, having completely included Soapbox into MSN Video. But this was just the first stage of a more ample strategy designed to make MSN Video rival YouTube. In this context, the newly introduced version of MSN Video, contains not only the Soapbox service, along with the adjacent copyright protection platform, but also enhancements designed to streamline the search, discovery,
and sharing of video content.
"This latest release of MSN Video will make discovering, watching and sharing video easier and more entertaining than ever before," said Rob Bennett, general manager, entertainment, video and sports for MSN. "By increasing the discoverability of our deep catalog, making it easier to share videos with friends, and improving the advertising model, we are continuing in our mission to make video an integral part of the MSN experience."
One of the major aspects that have been evolved with the availability of the new version is the ad serving rate adjacent to the actual videos. Following the acquisition of aQuantive for $6 billion, and the integration of the Atlas online advertising platform into Microsoft's own portfolio, the company is now introducing a new time-based advertising delivery model to MSN Video.
"The new MSN Video makes it easier for viewers to find and discover the breadth of video content from more than 40 leading video content providers, as well as video from across the Web. MSN Video now also integrates Soapbox user-generated videos directly into the same easy-to-use destination, and enables people to search and browse the entire MSN Video catalog while concurrently watching a video in a split-screen format. In addition, MSN Video users are now able to easily create playlists of their favorite videos and share them with friends," Microsoft revealed.
There is little doubt over the fact that Microsoft's changes introduced to MSN Video are in direct correlation with the growth of Google's own advertising delivery model for YouTube. In August, the Mountain View company revealed that it would overlay advertisements on top of some YouTube content. The new model unveiled by Microsoft is associated with the amount of time that users will spend viewing items on MSN Video. Until now, the company was serving ads at the beginning of every two video clips. Now an ad will be delivered at time intervals of three minutes. It still remains to be seen how users will respond to the segmentation of their viewing experience in this manner, and if the new model will prove a revelation or a gambit with a high potential of failure.
"The advertising delivery model for MSN Video, a first of its kind for a major online portal, now delivers advertising based on the amount of time a viewer spends watching videos, instead of by the number of clips watched. This improvement will provide a more predictable viewing experience and enable people to "channel surf" without being interrupted. MSN users will now see pre-roll advertisements before the first video and then see additional advertisements no more than once every three minutes during their viewing session," Microsoft explained.
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