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–Company Unveils New Mediaroom Features, Partnerships at CES

At CES in Las Vegas last week, Microsoft announced that its Mediaroom IPTV platform is now delivering video services to over a million set-top boxes worldwide and that its operator customers are, on average, adding two new IPTV subscriber households every minute. In addition, the company said, the platform is on track to reach a million subscriber homes in Q1, 2008.

According to the company, Mediaroom has now been deployed by, or is being trialed by, over 20 service providers in 18 countries on four continents (note: recently announced customers include India’s Reliance Communications; US-based nTelos; T-Com’s Montenegran pay-TV service, Extra TV; Italy’s Wind; and the United Arab Emirates’ du). Features offered by the platform include simultaneous recording of multiple HD and SD channels, personal media sharing, whole-home and remote DVR, multiple picture-in-picture scenarios, and integration with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming device. "The Microsoft Mediaroom platform is a key component in our vision to allow consumers to experience entertainment content on any device, anytime, anywhere," Enrique Rodriguez, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Connected Television Division, said in a prepared statement. "It is very rewarding to see this vision materialize with the support of our partners and customers. It is even more gratifying that the opportunity ahead for consumers to experience connected TV is even bigger than we had envisioned."

Microsoft announced a number of new Mediaroom features, applications and partnerships at CES:

• It launched a featured called DVR Anywhere, which is billed as enabling end-users to watch their recorded TV programs on any television set in their home. According to the company, the solution will allow end-users to, for example, begin watching a recorded movie in their livingroom, resume watching it on the kitchen TV during dinner, and finish watching it in their bedroom. It also allows end-users to watch the same or different recorded programs from multiple TV’s in the home simultaneously, the company says, while recording other shows for later viewing. Because the solution is software-based, it requires no TV tuners and only requires that one set-top box in the home have a hard drive (thus lowering expenses both for service providers and consumers, Microsoft points out). Microsoft claims that DVR Anywhere, which will support both SD and HDTV, is the first whole-home DVR offering currently available to IPTV operators.  
• The company has partnered with Showtime Networks and Turner Broadcasting on applications designed to "showcase the potential of Microsoft Mediaroom to bring consumers new, personalized connected TV experiences." The applications, which were demo’d in Microsoft’s CES booth (note: they are not yet available to consumers), were built in collaboration with ES3. They include 1) NASCAR on TNT, an app that would enhance TNT’s coverage of NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races by allowing viewers to choose between several different, live, in-car cameras and audio feeds, while simultaneously watching TNT’s main race broadcast; 2) Showtime Interactive Boxing, which, among other things, would allow viewers to choose between several live audio feeds while watching boxing coverage; and 3) an application that would accompany CNN’s 2008 election coverage, allowing viewers to access information from CNN.com and possibly also to participate in interactive straw polls for candidates.
• Dublin, Ireland-based interactive TV company, emuse technologies, has designed and built a Mediaroom application called My Pad, that Microsoft demo’d at CES. According to the company, the application connects viewers to their online social networks through the TV, via Windows Live services, and also enables them to share personal pages that exist online and on the TV.
• The company has teamed with ChoiceStream to develop an application that provides personalized TV and VOD recommendations.
• The company has formed an "ecosystem partnership" with Broadcom that will see them working together to ensure that Mediaroom client software operates on next-generation set-top boxes that use Broadcom’s BCM7405 system-on-a-chip.

Published in Issue 7.58 Part 2  January 14, 2008  Subscribe: http://www.itvt.com