I was able to get a beta login to a new video hosting site by Microsoft called soapbox. The interface is clean and very fast. I don’t spend a lot of time on video sites. But if Microsoft’s goal was to compete with YouTube or Netscape why did they not go out and find people that are popular in that community to review and make suggestions for the site.
I don’t create a lot of videos but one thing they could have done is made it so you don’t always have to re-upload videos. They should have an option where they pull the original video in by the submitter providing a URL to the video file. Seems like it would be much easier to submit to multiple sites.
Unlike Netscape, soapbox does not allow you to have access to your original file and their are no permalinks to the video that posted on the site. Overall soapbox looks like it will be just another of the many products Microsoft tries to compete with. It’s to bad that the corporate masters will not let the developers go outside the box and unwrap from the horrible MSN color scheme etc. [Soapbox]