I have been a user of MSN Video’s Soapbox from the very beginning when it was a private beta. Since then, I posted a number of videos on Soapbox that appeared on my various sites and accounted for almost 700,000 views.
I always preferred Soapbox over YouTube because the quality of videos was superior. Both services were reliable and provided the same functionality but Soapbox videos just looked better. But over time YouTube continued to evolve and add new features, increase limits and improve quality. Soapbox has remained exactly the same. I can’t name one new value-adding feature they added since I first started using the product in 2006. One of the most annoying limitations of Soapbox is the 100MB video size limit. YouTube also had a 100MB limit too when Soapbox launched but since then Google raised the YouTube limit to 1GB. Its almost 2009 and Microsoft still has the video size limit at 100MB.
I have not yet made up my mind if I will stop using MSN Soapbox for good but because of the file size limits I have already started using YouTube for my videos. With Google’s announcement today of new wide-screen high-quality videos I may abandon MSN Soapbox for good.
Which leads to my question: Did Microsoft abandon MSN Soapbox? The official MSN Soapbox team blog has not been updated since April when they announced a Vista sidebar gadget. Since then, the last update talking about new features was in September 2007.
Why has it has been more than a year since the last major feature update? Over that same period many new video sharing sites has started and YouTube has gone through a number of improvements. Has Microsoft thrown in the video towel already?
