• Cnet, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3 PM

Microsoft is shutting down Soapbox, its YouTube rival, the company said on Tuesday. "We have decided to shut down the Soapbox feature," Microsoft Vice President and MSN leader Erik Jorgensen said in an email. "Beginning today, July 21, we will be notifying both our customers and our internal and external partners that on July 29th, people will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox and on August 31st, the service will no longer be available."

Jorgensen said that Microsoft would continue to support MSN Video, which has 88 million unique users each month and delivers 480 million video streams each month. Soapbox represented less than 5% of MSN Video's streams. "Though we'll be retiring the Soapbox service in its current form, we are committed to user-generated content and our other video offerings through MSN Video," Jorgensen said. "We also plan to add functionality into MSN Video to easily enable bloggers and citizen journalists to upload content to share with our MSN users. Video remains an important and growing area within our overall content strategy."

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