Microsoft Launch Online Video Hosting Service

Microsoft are making their own play for the online video hosting market with Soapbox, a new service offered through MSN. The new service is in beta right now (and it’s only open to a select few), but the details in this PC World story don’t make it sound that exciting: you can upload, tag and offer videos for viewing. All pretty standard stuff, but there are two nice touches: you can watch a video while you continue browsing through the others, and they offer RSS feeds. These make life much easier if you want to keep track of the videos offered by a particular user: RSS readers will automatically notify you when they post a new video.

 

One thing that does seem odd is that the demo video on the home page seems to be in Flash video format. Could it be that Microsoft aren’t using their own Windows Media format for the videos?