This week MSN® announces the official launch of MSN Video Player® – a video-on-demand service that allows consumers to watch great TV shows anytime, anywhere for free, available at www.msn.co.uk/video from tomorrow. Since the pilot went live in August 2009, MSN Video Player has significantly expanded its library of content putting up over 1,000 hours of Britain’s top TV shows online for free, giving MSN viewers full-length programmes – many set to be available in High Definition (HD).

Over the last seven months, MSN Video Player has been developed both in terms of content and features to enhance the overall user experience. Further content deals have been signed with Endemol, Digital Rights Group, RDF Rights (part of the RDF Media Group), Shed Media, Raw Cut and ContentFilm in addition to the launch partnerships with ALL3MEDIA and BBC Worldwide.

Making the coming together of MSN Video and MSN Video Player to form one single offering: MSN Video Player will enable viewers to watch both TV shows and movies along with music videos, movie trailers, news and TV clips. The service will provide over 1,000 hours of free long-form video content with the number of titles and hours continuing to grow over time. New titles include: Skins, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Embarrassing Bodies, Waterloo Road, Doc Martin, Secret Millionaire, Wife Swap, Faking It, Bad Girls, Footballers’ Wives and Kingdom.

The new MSN Video Player also sees the addition of new features added to strengthen the quality of the user experience. These include:

• HD with Silverlight Smooth Streaming – users will be able to watch video at the highest quality their broadband capability will allow – this can be right up to 720p HD. Smooth Streaming leads to less buffering and enhances the viewing experience

• Personalised Playlist – users can be created and queued to automatically play

• Social media integration – users can point friends and followers to MSN Video Player videos via Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, MySpace, Diggit and other social media tools

MSN is continuing its long heritage of innovation to create engaging services that connect with often hard-to-reach audiences of strong appeal to advertisers. As the UK’s most popular news and entertainment portal, MSN attracts 23 million unique users every month (comScore, December 2009) making MSN, alongside bbc.co.uk, one of the UK’s favourite web portals.

Ashley Highfield, MD of Consumer & Online, Microsoft UK said: “MSN Video Player has been developed with rapidly changing consumer media behaviours in mind. The continuing rise in demand for online professionally produced video has enabled MSN to launch a service that has strong appeal to our users and advertisers. The latest comScore figures show that we are averaging at 25 minutes per viewer, per month on MSN Video Player, a figure that is significantly higher than many of the UK’s existing online TV services which suggests we are hitting the mark with our choice of content for the service.

“MSN Video Player will evolve and grow as a premium online destination for high quality video content over the coming months. We will continue to innovate in this space and work with advertisers, content owners and distributors alike to deliver a service that is highly valued.”

Mark Lesbirel, Director of Publishing at RDF Rights (part of the RDF Media Group) commented:

“It is exciting to be part of this next stage in the MSN Video Player story. Since the launch of the pilot it has gone from strength to strength with a clearly captivated audience. We are committed to producing popular and innovative programmes across various entertainment genres and partnering with an innovative service like MSN Video Player provides us with a platform best suited to consumer demands and advertising needs.”

MSN Video Player is available from here: www.msn.co.uk/video