Forum Moderators: phranque
Soapbox starts testing on Tuesday and will launch within six months as part of current service, MSN Video."It's really early days in online video; this is still act one," said MSN's Rob Bennett.
"We're definitely not blind to the fact that YouTube has a big lead right now," said Mr Bennett, general manager of MSN's entertainment and video services.
"Microsoft is jumping on this bandwagon with some uncertainty with where it's going, but the company believes it needs to be on board," Joe Wilcox, an analyst at Jupiter Research, told Reuters news agency."
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
Thanks to other sites out there, they've already got guidelines for what they need to do and not do, so to mimic other sites with the same service should be cake for Microsoft.
The issue comes in how they intend to market it. Right now, Microsoft offers so many services, and as was previously mentioned, a lot of new services. To add a video uploading gig, might just get lost in everything else.
Sites like YouTube concentrate pretty much solely on that service, making them senonymous with it. Consiquently, that's where people go for it.
Ultimately, I think that Microsoft can handle this service. And there's no doubt in my mind that they can do it better than a company that started in a garage a little over a year ago. However, I have doubts about whether or not they will make it appealing to the crowd that they need to.
They just don't seem to have that kind of edge.
