Microsoft's YouTube clone: MSN Soapbox

September 18, 2006 | Matt Marshall

Back in July, we mentioned that Microsoft was working on a YouTube clone.

Tomorrow it will be unveiled, according to Microsoft employee Kurt Shintaku, who doesn’t seem to know whether to call it by its internal codename “Warhol,” or its more boring official name “MSN Soapbox.”

I’ve been working with Warhol for the past couple of months and I really like it. It’s a glitzier version of Putfile that only uses Windows Media, which has been my mainstay for hosting content for a long time. The community is pretty active and the interface is superb.

It’s really bandwidth efficient, you can “copy” the content locally to your own machine if you have the right tools (instead of using some proprietary wrapper around it like you do with Google), it’s optimized to your network speed, and doesn’t require any plug ins or anything.

Why this is being released under the “MSN” brand is beyond us. Microsoft’s branding, between Live and MSN, is getting confusing.

LiveSide has more details: Soapbox allows for user uploaded videos of up to 100mb, in AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GPP, DV file formats…

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Tags: MSN Soapbox

About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.