Bing Entertainment Brings Full Music Streams To Search, Plus Games, Movies, And TV Shows
Bing's iPhone app isn't the only thing getting an upgrade today at Microsoft's search engine. Bing is also starting to roll out close to 100 new features to its main search engine on the Web.
Context & Ripple Effects
The rollout caps a dense June 2010 for Microsoft: Kinect received its name on June 14, Office 2010 reached general availability on June 15, and the Bing iPhone app was upgraded the same day this web release began shipping. Microsoft also skipped the quiet blog post — syndicated coverage shows the entertainment pitch was staged in Hollywood, with Search Engine Land reporting from a launch event featuring Ryan Seacrest and Beyond Binary framing the day as Microsoft and Hollywood debating the future of entertainment.
Timing matters because Bing's growth numbers were already contested: a June 11 report stated as confirmed that Yahoo and Microsoft had been inflating Bing's apparent gains under Comscore's measurement methodology. Against that backdrop, close to 100 features built to keep users inside Bing — full music streams, playable games, movies and TV — hand Microsoft an engagement narrative that does not rest on disputed query-share counts.
First-order effects
- Bing users can stream full songs and watch or play media inside the results page, converting Microsoft's search engine from a links layer into a destination for entertainment consumption.
- Labels, studios, and game publishers featured at the Hollywood launch gain a new licensed surface embedded in search results, extending the reach of the same-day Bing iPhone app upgrade.
Second-order effects
- Competitors face pressure to match in-result media playback rather than compete on link quality alone, since Bing is staking out entertainment search as a differentiated vertical.
- Content owners gain a second negotiating table beside existing download stores, because search engines seeking these experiences must license catalogs directly rather than merely index them.
Third-order effects
- If search engines continue absorbing playback and transactions, traffic and ad revenue around entertainment queries concentrate on the search page instead of destination sites, weakening the referral economy beneath media publishers.
- Sustained, the pattern points to search competition being settled through content partnerships and licensing deals as much as through crawling-and-ranking technology.
The trend: Search is shifting from ranking links to hosting licensed media directly on the results page, with Microsoft using entertainment partnerships as Bing's wedge against Google.