The Future of Windows Live Movie Maker

"When we set out to build Windows Live Movie Maker, we heard loud and clear that people wanted their movies to simply look better with less effort. In order to meet customers' needs, we first looked at how people were using Windows Movie Maker in Vista. What we found was that most movies were quite simple - often just a set of pictures with captions and a soundtrack with occasional small clips of lightly edited video with transitions. We also discovered that many people found the approach of Microsoft Photo Story 3 to be a great solution and loved the ease of selecting pictures, a soundtrack, and adding a narration track over their photos with basic animations. Increasingly, we found people publishing movies to popular video sharing sites to share with friends and family (in addition to occasionally creating DVDs)."

Mike Torres, the Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Movie Maker team, has posted a great blog entry about where the software is at, what they've learned from the initial beta they released a few months back, and what kinds of things (in general terms) users can expect to see from the software when Torres' team releases the next version. I just hope they don't name it Bing Movie Maker!