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Starting today, MSN Video will be gradually be rebranded and integrated into Bing Videos, providing a “unified experience” across Microsoft’s online video destinations. Here’s what the Bing team blog has to say:

Starting today and rolling out over the next few days Bing Videos will provide a new unified online video destination that delivers a comprehensive, organized, and high-quality video experience. This change will combine the powerful search experience of Bing, with the expertise of MSN Video all into one destination.

The official MSN team blog states that the MSN Video team will continue to provide the video editorial contents, however this will be accessible using the new Bing Videos technology:

MSN continues to invest in creating engaging original programming like Last Night on TV and offering the best video content from providers like MSNBC, Fox Sports, National Geographic, Entertainment Tonight, and more. Bing Videos will be a great new distribution vehicle for MSN Video content and the MSN video experience on Bing Videos will use a new HD-capable player (using Silverlight Smooth Streaming).

Here’s a screenshot of the new Bing Videos homepage, covering best of both worlds into one single destination:

Here’s a video of an interview with Rob Bennett, General Manager of Network Programming at MSN Video, talks about Microsoft’s investment in video and why Bing Videos is another great example of synergy between Bing and MSN.

Video: New Bing Video on MSN

Check out the new Bing Videos at http://www.bing.com/videos/browse!

Thanks to a reminder from Picturepan2@LiveSino.net, we noticed an update to Bing Reference that went unnoticed. For those who don’t know what Bing Reference is, it is a search vertical of Bing that is based on the acquired Powerset technologies that semantically indexes Wikipedia content and displays them in an enhanced view within Bing. As part of the recent Bing update, The side-pane on the right for Bing Reference has been significantly updated, and besides displaying an outline of the article, it also allows in-text searchers, “highlighter”, image search, video search, as well as integration with Bing Maps. Let take a closer look by having a look at today’s Bing homepage image, São Paulo:

Images and video search are also now integrated into the side-pane, displaying a list of all in-article images, related images from Bing Images, as well as related videos from Bing Videos. Additionally, Bing Maps is also fully integrated into this and automatically searches any in-text references to locations and displays them on a map, very handy!

To check out Bing Reference for yourself, visit http://www.bing.com/reference

We reported a few days ago that Favorites sync was temporarily turned off in Windows Live Toolbar for all users due to a technical glitch on the server side. The Windows Live Toolbar team just announced today that this has been fixed and the feature has been re-enabled:

We are happy to report that this issue with the “favorites sync” feature on Windows Live Toolbar has now been fixed and you can now re-enable this feature. As we mentioned in the original post, no data was actually lost and everything will work as expected and you can again get your favorites synced back to your browser on your PC.

You can access your synced Favorites at http://favorites.live.com