Microsoft Breathes Life into Bing Homepage with Video

The homepage for Microsoft’s Decision Engine, Bing, just got a little livelier today to celebrate the first day of autumn.

If you head to bing.com you’ll be greeted by a time-lapse video of a rising sun rolling over a river surrounded by foliage set against backdrop of mountains at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

The time lapse sunrise is the first video to appear on the Bing homepage, which has been the home to exquisite still images that rival National Geographic. The videos will not be a daily occurrence on the Bing homepage. When they do appear – to mark special events, anniversaries, holidays, etc., or whenever the “Bing team falls in love” with a video — they will be mixed in with the still photos that appear on Bing every day.

There’s a slight catch to viewing Bing homepage videos: they will only work with HTML5-enabled browsers (if you’re using the latest version of IE, Firefox, Chrome or Safari you are covered) and the videos can only be seen by users in the United States. In a blog post Microsoft states it will “begin rolling the video homepage out to international markets in the next few months.”

One complaint I have about the Bing homepage video is that, unlike still images, there is no Facebook Like button and Hotspots — little boxes within the images that provide more information and links to search queries.

My only other complaint about the time-lapse videos is the frequency, or should I say infrequency. I vote for a Bing homepage video every day. Hey, I might leave Google for that.

Below is a short video about the Bing team’s decision to add HTML5-enabled videos to the homepage.