Microsoft announced last week MSN Premium, its latest online service.
The service, designed for use with broadband Internet connections, will be available Jan. 8 and offer a range of features, including spam filters, anti-virus capabilities, a firewall, parental controls, photo management, exclusive multimedia content and multiple e-mail accounts.
MSN Premium will compete with America Onlines new AOL 9.0 Optimized service. MSN Premium applications are tied together by a unified graphical interface.
One of the new applications, MSN Video, provides streaming video from television partners such as the MSNBC cable news network and the ESPN sports programming network.