Redmond, Washington — It seems that Microsoft is admitting defeat in the race of video-sharing. MSN Video will live on, but Soapbox is bound disappear in the darkness. Microsoft, which last month hinted about scaling back Soapbox, its user-generated video-sharing rival to YouTube, has finally decided to shut it down, the company said Tuesday.
Soapbox, which is often referred to as a YouTube clone, was hardly catering to only a small percentage of Microsoft’s overall video streams, and of course even that total does not compare favorably to the numbers posted by sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Hulu.
News of Microsoft’s rolling back its Soapbox, was first reported by paidContent.org, during an interview with Corporate Vice President Erik Jorgensen, that MSN Video’s Soapbox service will be shutting down completely.
“We have decided to shut down the Soapbox feature,” Jorgensen said. “Beginning today, July 21, we will be notifying both our customers and our internal and external partners that on July 29th, people will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox and on August 31st, the service will no longer be available.”
That should give users a reasonable amount of time to rescue their content, while also letting Microsoft cut its losses in the near future.
According to an interview with CNET’s Ina Fried, Jorgensen pointed out that sponsorship for those videos — which constituted about 5% of MSN Video’s content portfolio — was too low for the service to be sustained in the present economy, though he was careful at that time not to reveal the extent.
Soapbox, which started its so short a journey to nowhere in September 2006, after making a strategic decision with a closed beta test, that was opened up to public testers the following February.
Jorgensen says the service generated less than 5 percent of overall streams on its MSN Video site, where the videos were hosted. Advertisers have also shown a strong preference for placing their ads around professionally created video content, rather than near user-created clips.
Jorgensen emphasized, however, that MSN remains committed to video, pointing out that MSN Video had its top ever month in the U.S. last year. The company is planning a major overhaul of its MSN portal for later this fall that will focus the site’s content offerings in fewer areas, including news, entertainment, sports, finance, and lifestyle.
Microsoft will continue to support MSN Video, which has 88 million unique users each month and delivers 480 million video streams each month, he said.
“Though we will be retiring the Soapbox service in its current form, we are committed to user-generated content and our other video offerings through MSN Video,” Jorgensen said. “We also plan to add functionality into MSN Video to easily enable bloggers and citizen journalists to upload content to share with our MSN users. Video remains an important and growing area within our overall content strategy.”
Microsoft’s soapbox, failed to catch on as widely as YouTube. Google’s in-house offering, Google Video, did not either, but Google has chosen to support it.
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see whether Microsoft has some Bing-branded video offering in the works, or if the company will be content to let things stand as they are.