I’m a beta tester of Soapbox, MSN’s video sharing site. It looks very cool and I’ll watched some videos, videos in German are also available.
In an interview, Microsoft’s chief for internet said, Soapbox can keep up with Google’s YouTube, but MS hadn’t to pay $ 1,6 billion for it. It looks smart, but not better than YouTube. YouTube fits to Google, because YouTube is a simple constructed site, just like Google.
The Soapbox by MSN is very more tricky. If you get a video link, the video isn’t on the center. It is on the right side. But on the left side you’ll see other videos. At the moment, there is “Me Riding Him”, which seems like a porn video.
Now I show you an example link. It’s much longer than e.g. Google Video or YouTube links: http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=13cec734-cf1a-4e61-8289-e385958df93e. Next an example for a user site: http://soapbox.msn.com/?user=-1293940734448877104.
Each person can submit some tags to any video. I added “German”, “Markus Maria Profitlich” and “Glasses” to the one above.
But I think the flash video player of Soapbox looks better than YouTube’s player. So maybe I’ll use it in future, but I think Revver’s idea is the best in the video sharing scene. They pay for clicking on the video and watching.