Chat-and-Watch TV Arrives on Live Messenger

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MSN TV will just be available in 20 countries. A new TV service integrated in Live Messenger. Now, you can watch video clips while you chat with your friends. On a small TV box, you can watch a range of clips from MTV shows and music clips from Sony BMG among others.

John Mangelaars, the vice-president, EMEA, of consumer and online for Microsoft says,

Online video has exploded in popularity over the last year, but to date it has been something people watch on their own. Messenger TV is set to change all that.

Microsoft believes that watching videos together while chatting online could be a new form of "social experience." Users already share comments and offer opinions. MSN TV would be just another socially interactive tool. As it is we have been sharing pictures, videos and comments. But with this we now will be able to watch videos simultaneously with the person on the other end of the chat box. While nothing very new or novel, its just another addition to the chatting experience. Chatting has got increasingly interactive over the years, starting from bland text boxes to emoticons, from sharing chat lingo to pictures and albums, and now to video. It can be said that every online medium is adapting convergence in a big way to remain viable.

How will it work?

Users just need to start a regular chat session with a friend via Windows Live Messenger, then launch Messenger TV from the list of activities within Messenger. A list of available content from MSN Video will appear, from which a playlist can be created.

U.K. users will also be able to tap television shows and music videos from third parties. Microsoft said it has content partnerships with EMI and the UK's Channel 4 to screen videos from popular performers such as Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams and hit shows like Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares. Additional content partners include National Geographic, Reuters, and the ITN network.

But will this TV feature remain true for third party interoperability? Yahoo! and Microsoft have interoperability between their two messengers, creating a large instant messenger user base worldwide. Microsoft though claims that Windows Live Messenger is the world's most popular free instant messaging service, with more than 240 million users worldwide. Their are also third party programs like Trillian, Pidgin which allow interoperability between chat clients. The news feature did not answer whether this interoperability will extend to all these programs too. Logic assumes it will. So, lets see how it catches on.

The service will launch in 20 countries including many European countries, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Brazil, Canada and Mexico but surprisingly not the United States.

Microsoft it seems is concentrating on its own portfolio after repeated failures to purchase Yahoo.