Microsoft’s Soapbox Open to Public
Microsoft’s homegrown video-sharing effort, Soapbox, came out of private beta and into public beta yesterday, meaning everyone can go use it. Soapbox is not terribly distinctive, but it helps round out MSN’s set of blogging and other personal expression tools. We had reviewed the private beta version in December.
One thing Soapbox does particularly well is let you search, view comments, and add tags without interrupting the video that’s playing. However, many features seem to get a little freaked out when you’re not logged in.
Here’s an example video:
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Thank god they have some good video over there, though. Here’s todays number one!
Video: leila on farting 2
Schlomo Rabinowitz on February 14th, 2007 at 12:34 pm - Permalink
I can’t believe I just watched that.
Liz Gannes on February 14th, 2007 at 12:45 pm - Permalink
there are 3 notes that should be added to this articles about how soapbox behaves and stands against other services:
1.- Windows live Ecosystem.
You can post to spaces, download videos to zune (partially supported ,but will be added in full later), and you can synch the video to your live messenger allowing you to watch a video along a contact
2.- Targeted experience.
The experience using IE7 in soapbox is better than with other browser because it serves the new improved wmv-s codec along with a smart cache that allow you to jump forward to any point of the video and stream from there on.
The experience in other browsers uses a smart loading served with flash, that is still in experimentation but that has slowly turned better and better, but it is still not as fast loadig than other contrire to the lightening fast it is under IE7.
3.-totally asynchronic and dynamic layout..
this is allow you have lightbox streaming, coment input, report, taging, rating, searching and uploading without ever interrumping your viewing..
you can upload a video and at the same time being viewing a video and leaving a message in the same breath.. this allows for a very speedy watching, if have a 3000 mb line and it is like watching tv… in that respect it is what makes it stand out the most.
so, it does has some unique features to it.
Avatar on February 14th, 2007 at 10:49 pm - Permalink
Avatar — Though this was a brief article so I may not have done them justice, I think I did address points 1 and 3. But I’d love to learn more about the smart cache stuff.
Liz Gannes on February 15th, 2007 at 12:38 am - Permalink
[…] Soapbox in public beta: Soapbox is the video sharing site from Microsoft. [source] [source] […]
Video Monte Ceneri » News - 15.02.2007 on February 15th, 2007 at 1:14 pm - Permalink