In a lawsuit lost against British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB), Microsoft was recently forced to rename their unified cloud storage service known as SkyDrive.

The result is a global rebranding of the service to OneDrive, which Microsoft hopes will be the “One place for all of your photos and videos. One place for all of your documents. One place that is seamlessly connected across all the devices you use” and a service that “You want [OneDrive] for everything in your life”.

[youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4NsPPUDjyU’]

Before the rebranding, Microsoft’s SkyDrive offered users 7GB of free storage. With OneDrive, Microsoft aims to give current users the opportunity to more than double that initial offering.

According to a report by LiveSide, Microsoft’s OneDrive will take a page out of the DropBox playbook by offering an additional 500MB of cloud storage for every person a user refers to the service, up to a maximum of 10 people (5GB).

Microsoft’s cloud service will also add an additional 3GB of storage to users who choose to use the ‘camera roll’ feature of the OneDrive mobile application to backup and sync photographs from iOS, Android, and Windows Phones. In essence, Microsoft is essentially ‘giving away’ an extra 8GB of additional storage to anyone with a bunch of friends and a smart mobile device.

The rebrand also brings Microsoft’s cloud based storage service inline with some of Microsoft’s newer products, like company’s Xbox One “all in one” game console.

[Sources: OneDrive blog, LiveSide]

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Junior Editor at Vamers. From Superman to Ironman; Bill Rizer to Sam Fisher and everything in-between, Edward loves it all. He is a Bachelor of Arts student and English Major specialising in Language and Literature. He is an avid writer and casual social networker with a flare for all things tech related.