soapbox

Microsoft is closing Soapbox, its onetime video-sharing rival to Google's YouTube, the company said Tuesday.

Last month, Microsoft told CNET News it planned to significantly scale back Soapbox. Now it turns out Soapbox will be scaled all the way down to nothing.

"We have decided to shut down the Soapbox feature," said Microsoft Vice President and MSN leader Erik Jorgensen in an e-mail. "Beginning today, July 21, we will be notifying both our customers and our internal and external partners that on July 29th, people will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox and … Read more

Although most of the discussion of Microsoft's online business has been around Bing, its new search engine, Microsoft is also working on a fall revamp for MSN, its decade-old portal site.

Though often overlooked by Microsoft watchers, the MSN portal remains critically important to Microsoft's online business. Its home page is the crown jewel of its display ad business and MSN is also responsible for about half of the company's Internet search traffic. And, despite the notion that portals are passe, Microsoft says its research shows that 37 percent of Internet users still rely on a portal … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In the coming months, Microsoft plans to significantly scale back Soapbox, the video site it once hoped might take on YouTube in the user-generated content arena.

In an interview on Tuesday, Microsoft Vice President Erik Jorgensen said Soapbox is one of the areas that Microsoft is pulling back on in the wake of a tough economic environment. His unit also recently pulled the plug on Microsoft Money, the company's personal finance software product.

Soapbox launched in 2006--the same year Google announced its deal to buy YouTube--but never emerged as a significant threat to the market leader. (… Read more

Microsoft is putting a stop watch on new video-ads found on the company's Web sites.

Visitors to MSN will see an advertisement prior to watching their first video and then new ads will appear every three minutes after. The ads not only show up in the video player but they also unfold an extended section that is similar to a pop-up ad.

This is a different tact taken by Google's YouTube, which last month began testing an overlay format that appears at the bottom of the screen for 10 seconds before disappearing.

Both companies are trying to figure … Read more

update Microsoft is again inviting people to join video-sharing site Soapbox, following the site's two-month hiatus.

On Friday, Soapbox re-emerged with software tools designed to thwart copyright violations. A note posted on Soapbox's blog said the systems, created by digital fingerprinting company Audible Magic, offer "proactive filtering" of videos uploaded to the site.

"Audible Magic bases their filtering on the video's audio track and their database is being updated constantly," Soapbox said in its blog.

In March, Soapbox abruptly stopped accepting new registrations. The move came a day after Microsoft agreed to stream long-form video … Read more

Microsoft is closing its video-sharing site, Soapbox, to new users for up to two months so it can create better safeguards against pirated content.

The software giant, which agreed earlier Thursday to distribute movies and TV shows for big media companies, has seen Soapbox fill up with unauthorized clips since a test version of the site launched last month.

No new subscribers will be accepted, but anyone who has already signed up for Soapbox can continue to access the site, said Adam Sohn, a director in Microsoft's online-services group.

Microsoft stood to be embarrassed by the existence of pirated work on Soapbox. There was a real possibility that the company could have found itself distributing video from News Corp. and NBC Universal, at the same time another one of its units was hosting material stolen from those same companies.

Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo have agreed to be part of a new online joint venture of media conglomerates that also includes NBC Universal and News Corp. The new video network, scheduled to debut this summer, will feature full-length programming, movies, and clips from at least a dozen television networks and two major film studios. … Read more

Microsoft unleashed its Soapbox Web video platform to the unwashed masses yesterday, taking the service out of private beta. We covered Microsoft Soapbox in September. The service has a clean and simple layout, and manages to keep both the MSN moniker and the often-clunky Windows Live Login (formerly .NET Passport). What baffles me about this is that despite having access to all your personal information, Soapbox won't parse your Windows Live ID to fill in simple profile information like your name and location, unless you've recently gone through and updated it since opening a Hotmail account in the … Read more