MSN Video Is Now Bing Videos

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

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?

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