Microsoft to launch YouTube rival
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Microsoft is launching an online video-sharing service to compete with YouTube.
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Fox, Viacom, CBS and NBC are holding talks about buiding a rival to YouTube to host their online content. Any deal is still a long way off, however, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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Microsoft on Friday re-opened MSN Soapbox, the company's competitor to Google's YouTube, after two months of being closed to the public due to copyright concerns. The updated Soapbox now lets anyone view videos without being signed, and includes filtering of content.
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Site will run programming from the two networks and hope to compete with YouTube.
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Microsoft will jump into the music-downloading market this week, with the rollout of a new MSN online-music service that will compete with Apple&#39;s iTunes and RealNetworks&#39; Rhapsody.
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In an attempt to challenge Google's YouTube, Viacom announces plans to make its videos available on thousands of sites.
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Google Inc., racing to head off a  media industry backlash over its video Web site YouTube, will  soon offer anti-piracy technologies to help all copyright  holders thwart unauthorized video sharing, its chief executive  said on Wednesday.
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Never shy about arriving late, Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news - research) is expected to launch a new version of its search service Thursday as the software titan seeks a stronger spot in that lucrative corner of Internet advertising.
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Microsoft Corp. is testing a way to present video advertising that's less annoying to Web surfers.
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By JESSE NOYES  Still fresh from a megamerger with Google, video-sharing site YouTube is planning to pass along some of its newfound wealth.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft thinks its Live Search can match GoogleÂ in some areas now, but the company has been theÂ underdog in searchÂ for so long it's not even trying to lure users away from its rival -- at least not yet. Showing off a dizzying array of tools to reporters and analysts at its Silicon Valley campus in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., Microsoft executives said several times that the company is focused on providing a better search experience for current users of Live Search, hoping toÂ get them to search there more often. The Redmond, Wash., company also wants to lure users of its MSN portal to more frequently use Live Search. They compared Live Search's results to those of Google in some cases and said customer research showed its user satisfaction catching up to Google, but didn't talk about grabbing market share. The numbers are damning: About 37 percent of Web searchers sometimes use Live Search, but only about 11 percent of all searches are done on the site, Microsoft said, citing independent statistics. The average user of Live Search does 15 searches on the site per month, while the comparable number for Google is 55. Microsoft runs behind YahooÂ and Google, and Derrick Connell, a general manager in product management at Microsoft, acknowledged that the search product was actually losing market share in the first four months of this year. But the company hopes to gain ground at least among its current base with the new capabilities. Over the past three years, Microsoft has quietly invested in basic things such as coverage, expanding its index to more than 20 billion Web documents, executives said. But it's more flashy additions in video, health, local search and maps that may help Live Search make an impression. The new video search interface, one of the features to be rolled out gradually to all visitors over the next week, lets users play a preview of each video on a results page just by putting the cursor over the image representing it. Using internally developed technology as it "crawls" a video Web site, Microsoft detects moments in a video that are likely to be highlights, said Mike Nichols, a group program manager in Live Search. Those parts are combined in a 30-second preview that searchers can watch to get an idea of what a longer video is like. Audio peaks, flashes of light and scene changes are among the elements Microsoft's automated system looks for. The previews are cached on Microsoft's own servers for quick playing, he said. Microsoft's new specialized health search engine, to be rolled out the following week, will divide results into separate columns for journal articles, Web results and sponsored results. To address consumer worries about privacy, all searches and results on the health site will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). In local search, Microsoft is using its Virtual Earth tool for richer results. It can project aerial photographs of places on Virtual Earth's navigable three-dimensional maps of major cities, said General Manager Erik Jorgensen. A tool for users to show highlights of a trip, called Collections, will be enhanced so viewers can just click through the trips or passively watch them in a virtual video rather than looking around a map. The maker of a Collection will also be able to upload the virtual video to sites such as YouTube, he said. Local directions will also be enhanced. Rather than make users enter a starting point, Live Search will offer directions from all the major highways, from which users can choose. As an option, the local search engine will also be able to modify those directions in light of current traffic conditions. Local and mapping features will be rolled out by mid-October, according to the company. Microsoft has done a poor job selling its search offerings, and if it has matched Google on factors such as relevance, few people would believe that right now, said Gartner Inc. analyst Van Baker. The new video, health and local search features are impressive and Microsoft is doing the right thing by targeting current Live Search users and MSN portal visitors, he said. "They've got to make sure that [group] is happy first," Baker said. After that, it may be able to convince others that Live Search is worth a try.
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SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp. is hoping to tap the explosive popularity of online video sharing by joining startups and major Internet rivals with its own video service.
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YouTube, the popular online video   sharing service, is teaming up with major marketing and media   partners for a competition to discover the most talented   unsigned bands on its site.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has unveiled a public beta of its MSN Soapbox video-upload service, its competitor to Google Inc.'s popular YouTube service. The service, which Microsoft unveiled last September, has been available to beta testers only by invitation for several months. But now anyone can test out the service by going to this Web site , reports the the LiveSide blog , which tracks Microsoft's Windows Live Internet services. Like YouTube, Soapbox allows users not only to upload videos to the Web in almost any digital video format, but also to tag and categorize them so other users can find them. The service also lets users watch videos and browse for new ones simultaneously on the same screen, something that differentiates it from YouTube, Microsoft has said. Microsoft has been assembling a raft of Web-based services to compete with Google and Yahoo Inc. since November 2005, when Chief Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled the company's Live services initiative. The company has said it would invest a significant amount of money in its Web efforts, and financial analysts expect Microsoft to give an update on this plan during a briefing with analysts in New York Thursday. Though many believe the Live services will replace Microsoft's MSN branded services, the company continues to maintain MSN as a site where it offers entertainment content, which may explain why it branded Soapbox with the MSN name rather than Live. The Live moniker refers more to actual services such as Windows Live e-mail, instant messaging and search. Google announced in October it was buying YouTube for US$1.65 billion, a price many thought was too high for the video service. Still, YouTube remains one of the most popular sites on the Web.
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Microsoft Corp.'s effort to compete against Apple's iPod juggernaut will focus on the idea that people want to be able to easily share music with friends and others.
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Blog: YouTube partners with Hearst-Argyle to put TV on your PC.
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By Elizabeth M. Gillespie  Microsoft Corp. is hoping to tap the explosive popularity of online video sharing by joining start-ups and major Internet rivals with its own video service.