MSN Video Is Now Bing Videos

TechCrunch.com
Tuesday, November 10, 2009; 1:28 PM
Capitalizing on the Bing brand, Microsoft is consolidating MSN Video into Bing Videos. If you go to video.msn.com it redirects to Bing Video. The new video search destination lets you both search for videos on the Web and watch them within the Bing player.

The main video page is set up to help you browse and discover videos, with featured videos in a large player across the top and tabbed categories below that including editorial picks, viral clips, "Last Night on TV", and the "Best of Bing." A lot of this looks like a direct port from MSN Video. there is still even a tab called "Most Watched On MSN Video." They might want to change that now.

Bing Video brings in videos from YouTube, Hulu, ABC and more, and directly hosts 900 TV shows. When you search for a show like True Blood, you get Bing's familiar guided navigation on the left, which lets you narrow down your search by season, episodes, trailers, length, and format.

The Bing video player also has a lights-out mode. You kind of get the feeling that Bing doesn't want you to leave. Of course, neither does Yahoo Video, Google Video, Blinkx, or most other video search engines these days. But Bing Videos is such a better brand. What MSN property will be subsumed into Bing next?

from The Washington Post

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Comment: Blinkx powers video search for MSN UK, so presumably that will be rolled into Bing as well?

Not that the company will tell us, the shareholders, of course. Yet more mushroom management...

I don't know why MS don't go the whole hog and just buy Blinkx. They (MS) have a history of buying companies whose technology they start off by licensing. And it would serve Blinkx mgmt right for letting the share price drift so shamefully - they don't seem to get it that one of the best defences to being taken over is a high market cap. Mind you, nobody seems to want to take Blinkx over at any price - I wonder why?...