Soapbox – the MSN video sharing service – is back open for full video viewing. The service started as a closed beta, opened for full public a few months later but went back into closed beta soon after. The reason for this closure was related to the many piracy issues video sharing services have to deal with and the Soapbox team wanted to fix that first before going public again.
Next to a few updates on performance, Soapbox is now also using CopySense technology from Audible Magic for proactive automated filtering of copyright content. Other tools to fight piracy will be added as well. Soapbox is still in beta so expect more updates to come soon.
Soapbox offers much of the same as the other known video services (tagging, embedding, commenting, …) but what I find really differentiating on it is the link with Live Messenger. You can very easily IM a video, which means you’ll watch it at the same time with a Messenger buddy whil in a chat conversation. Good fun, I’ll tell you.
Earlier this year (in april) Soapbox already updated much of the UI and better integration with MSN Video.
Technorati Tags: soapbox, youtube, dailymotion, video, sharing, copyright, piracy, msn
'Cross The Breeze 
I love MSN Soapbox. I think it’s a great video-sharing site. It’s great except for a few things:
1. The new piracy thingy. I love to watch music videos. But if they aren’t on Soapbox, then that makes me unhappy. So would it be for most other users. It’s really a sad thing for users. I don’t like it. That’s how YouTube was successful I think. Because they had some neat content like that. You don’t see YouTube doing away with that. So if Soapbox is going to become sucessful, that’s kind of a no-no to me.
2. I hate the character/symbol limitations. They seem to be somewhat worse than YouTube’s. Everything seems to have a limit. I don’t like that.
3. Lack of user content. Of course, being a beta, not too many users coming by to drop in some stuff. But once it’s out of beta, there will be more.
That’s my only quirks with Soapbox. Otherwise than that, it’s perfect.
Hey Michael – good to see you like the service, I only wished WordPress.com would allow me to embed it :)
To come back to your comments:
1. This is definitely not only an issue for Soapbox, but more an evolution of that industry, also YouTube and other will integrate the same type of anti piracy measures, something they’re working on now.
2. I don’t like the limitations either, I think that’s very valuable feedback, for me it concerns mainly the number of tags you can add, but fully agree here
3. Lack of content is indeed strongly linked to the fact that the service has been in closed beta for a long time, so hopefully this will change very quickly now