Microsoft launches Messenger TV

Microsoft wants to conquer a place in the online video market with its Messenger TV service. The company is adding a social component to web video with the ability for users to watch video with Live Messenger contacts.

The new service, Messenger TV baptized Due to its integration with chat platform Windows Live Messenger, watching online videos should make it social. Microsoft hopes to give MSN Video a new impulse with this: sites like Youtube are many times more popular than Microsoft’s video site. For the time being, Messenger TV has been launched in Europe, Canada and Australia, among others, but American visitors can easily bypass the control, which works based on the language set in the browser. In addition to the videos from the MSN Video archives, Microsoft can draw on the offerings of partners for the new service: the company has agreements with Twentieth Century Fox, Pepsi and National Geographic, among others.

To use Messenger TV, chatters must choose Messenger TV from the list of activities during a regular chat session. A Flash-based video player then appears in the chat window, after which a playlist can be composed of the available clips. Whoever calls Messenger TV first retains control over the videos to be played, but can be handed over to other chat participants if desired. In addition to the functionality to give control to other chatters, there is also the option to share the video with others via email or Live Spaces. When searching for videos via the search function, the results are not shown in the chat window, but in a browser window.

The new service from Microsoft resembles a project from Youtube’s Testtube: Streams. The difference of this variant of ‘video chat’ with the service from Microsoft is that the feature is completely web-based and that it obviously lacks the huge user numbers of Live Messenger.