"MSN today announced the US beta release of Soapbox on MSN Video, a user-uploaded video service that makes it easy for people to express themselves by uploading, discovering and sharing personal videos with the Soapbox community and others around the world. Soapbox will be available on MSN Video and will be deeply integrated throughout Microsoft Corp.'s portfolio of online services, including Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Messenger," says Microsoft's press release.
It works with Firefox and videos can be up to 100 megabytes. However, it's invitation only for now. Form a queue at http://soapbox.msn.com.
AP went to the preview yesterday.
CNet has a short news story and an even shorter "hands on" that concludes:
In sum, Soapbox is disappointing. It's a slightly better sharing service than YouTube in some small technical ways, but it doesn't help users make money from their content like Revver does; it doesn't have granular privacy controls like Vox; it won't post directly into blogs for you like VideoEgg; and it won't show videos from other networks like Yahoo Video. Given Microsoft's position in the video sharing market (dead last), I expected a more aggressive product.
Afterthought: One point is that the quality for Windows users can be brilliant -- using wmv. Linux and Mac users, however, get the usual low-grade transcoded Flash rubbish familiar from YouTube and similar sites. Question for any odd Linux user with beta access and the time to spare: can you get access to the wmv files using MPlayer, gmplayer or Xine etc?
