Another job posting is stirring up speculation about Microsoft’s plans in digital entertainment.
Working on word from her tipsters, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet has dug up a Microsoft job posting for a position in a group called the Ventura Media Services team. She reports that the group is “focused on music and video discovery and consumption,” with social features including recommendations, ratings and comments.
Matt Rosoff of Business Insider, previously an analyst covering Microsoft’s digital entertainment strategies, offers an interesting history lesson and takes a guess that this could be Microsoft’s response to the Pandora streaming music service.
If that’s the case, we’ve been here before. Microsoft’s “me-too” responses to established Internet properties generally haven’t turned out well. Anyone remember MSN Soapbox, the company’s user-generated video site?
But the description in the job post makes the Ventura initiative sound pretty ambitious.
We are Ventura Media Services – an agile team working on the beginning of some very large scale projects. We incubate, innovate and iterate. We are all about building services the right way. The team is a tight group of music and video lovers that create services and experiences revolving around music\video discovery and consumption. We are not afraid to try new things in the name of pushing the bleeding edge of technology.
Previously on GeekWire: Xbox 3D? Job postings tip Microsoft’s hand
