Wow! Multiple Bing posts in a week. But there’s plenty to talk about. The latest is that Bing is now offering videos.
The new Bing Video is available at http://www.bing.com/videos/browse. Here you’ll find videos from Microsoft properties, but also from other places like ABC, Hulu, and YouTube. You’ll see tabs for Editor’s Picks, hot clips, what was on TV last night, etc. You can also, as you might imagine, do a search.
I did a search for Federal Reserve (dunno, feeling kind of boring today) and got over 50,000 results (yow!) from a variety of sources including YouTube, MySpace, USA Today, rediff, and CBS News. Results are shown on a grid with a thumbnail, source, title, date, and duration. Click on the thumbnail image to get an embedded viewer with a place for ratings and comments (I didnt’ see any comments on the videos I watched.) You can also hold your mouse over a video to get a popup of detail and an animation of the thumbnail — very cool.
There’s also a list of the most popular videos and an “Up Next” tab. The videos in the “Up Next” tab seem to be related but I can’t figure out how it’s being populated; I don’t know if they’re related, or if they’ve showed up in playlists, or if they’re what other people are watching, or what.
Like YouTube, Bing Video has a quicklist feature that allows you to build a quick queue. The queue page shows you a playing video, what’s next in your queue and details about what you’re playing. Something it doesn’t show — and I don’t think YouTube does either — is the total duration of the quicklist. Am I weird for wanting that? It would be nice to know if I have enough time to watch what I want to watch.
I was impressed with how many results I got with a Bing Video search, and the player is easy to use. It’s not going to take the place of something like Clicker, but it’s a nice aggregation. Well done Bing.
Categories: News