itvt

–Unveils Mediaroom Advertising Platform
–Launches Mediaroom Migration Program
–Demos ITV Apps Based on New Mediaroom Presentation Framework

At the IBC show in Amsterdam earlier this month, Microsoft TV unveiled an adjunct offering to its Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform, called the Microsoft Mediaroom Advertising Platform. According to the company, the new offering–which employs technologies from two companies that were recently acquired by Microsoft, Navic Networks (June, 2008) and aQuantive (May, 2007)–supports cross-platform deployments of advertisements and lets operators that have deployed Mediaroom offer targeted, measurable and interactive advertising spots, all from a single, comprehensive platform. Microsoft bills the Mediaroom Advertising Platform, which it says marks “the first instance of Microsoft advertisement investments focused on TV services,” as combining the addressability enabled by IPTV technology with “state-of-the-art” tools for campaign and decision management powered by Microsoft Advertising (note: the Microsoft Advertising portfolio includes such digital advertising tools as Atlas, AdECN, adCenter, DRIVEpm, Massive and ScreenTonic). Now, the company boasts, the interactivity, audience addressability and “true measurement” provided by online advertising models can be applied to the IPTV space, thus making campaigns more effective and enabling additional revenue opportunities for operators. The company says that the new platform will support ad-insertion into all TV formats, including linear TV, VOD, third-party interactive TV applications, and operator-owned assets such as the EPG.

In addition to allowing advertisers to target their ads to specific groups and measure those ads’ effectiveness, Microsoft says, the new advertising platform lets advertisers and their agencies adjust their campaigns in a timely manner, based on measured impressions and engagement–thus enabling brands to reach the right audiences while simultaneously increasing viewer satisfaction. “The new advertising platform opens up new promise and opportunity for broadband service providers deploying Microsoft Mediaroom, and positions them well for the quickly evolving world of digital advertising,” Enrique Rodriguez, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Connected Television division, said in a prepared statement. “With this offering, our customers will have a solution that delivers greater value to both advertisers and viewers through relevance and measurability, further capitalizing on the benefits of a connected TV environment.” According to Microsoft, the new Mediaroom Advertising Platform will be available to Mediaroom-equipped operators starting next year.

In other Microsoft TV news:

• The company also used the IBC show to launch its Microsoft Mediaroom Migration Program, which is designed to make it easier for operators that are currently using other companies’ IPTV platforms to migrate to Mediaroom. According to the company, the new program provides such operators with a structured assessment process and analytical tools for migration, including business and technical workshops to review set-top box portability, network compatibility and audio-visual headend interoperability. It also includes risk-benefit tools to compare lifetime customer value and build the business case for management, the company says. “As the IPTV market matures, we’re seeing interest from operators on first-generation platforms and homegrown solutions to migrate to Microsoft Mediaroom,” Ben Huang, director of product management for Microsoft Mediaroom, said in a prepared statement. “These service providers need to add high-definition and advanced digital video recording and video-on-demand features that are now fundamental to any competitive TV offering, and they want to remain competitive by being able to easily deploy advanced interactive applications. We are currently engaged in assessing migration opportunities with a number of customers and have been approached by many more. Platform migrations are complex, so this program has been developed to assist with business and technical planning, and reduce the cost and pain of migration.” According to Microsoft, the Mediaroom Migration Program is organized into three “key phases” that take an operator from initial consideration of to full migration to the Mediaroom platform: Phase One consists of “planning scenarios around engineering and business metrics, assessment of lifetime value of the customer, marketing research kit, usability testing”; Phase Two consists of “trial program creation, including infrastructure and set-top box migration and migration communications planning”; and Phase Three consists of “delivery of training and workshops, operational readiness planning for commercial deployment, platform migration and eventual legacy decommissioning” and also includes “review of the architecture including servers, set-top boxes, encoder feeds and video-on-demand assets.”
• In addition, Microsoft TV showcased a number of new interactive TV applications for Mediaroom at the IBC show. The apps included a Mediaroom service developed by Dublin-based interactive TV authoring solutions provider, emuse, using content from the BBC (note: emuse has a contract in place to develop ITV applications for BT Vision, the Mediaroom-powered hybrid IPTV/DTT service of UK incumbent telco, BT). According to Microsoft, the app was intended to show how the BBC’s journalistic content, including news, sports and weather, could look in the future, and built on the success of the Corporation’s red-button and iPlayer services to provide “interactive access to a huge breadth and depth of the broadcaster’s content and services via an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.” The app also featured user-generated content and social networking functionality: it let viewers access images and video uploaded by other viewers, and allowed them to recommend and share programs with their friends. Microsoft and emuse claim that the application demonstrates how publishers can “integrate interactive TV as part of a multiplatform system” and that “no extra journalistic effort is required to make content available on Web, mobile and IPTV platforms.” Other demos at the show included an application, developed by ES3, that overlaid the screen with information widgets and that focused on the collation of real-time content from the Web, including stock prices, horoscopes, local weather and famous quotes. According to Microsoft, it was designed to show how operators can cost-effectively repurpose content onto the TV in a highly personalized and easy-to-use manner. In addition, a second application from emuse was unveiled at the show, which connected viewers to their online social networks through the TV, via Windows Live services, and allowed them to share their personal pages online and on TV. All the apps on display were built using Microsoft’s new Mediaroom Presentation Framework, which the company beta-launched in May to around 100 customers (note: for more on the Mediaroom Presentation Framework, see [itvt]’s interview with Microsoft TV’s director of media services, Shari Barnett, in Issue 7.91). The full release of the technology is scheduled for deployment by Mediaroom-powered IPTV operators later this year, with the first live applications expected to debut next year. “These applications set the benchmark for a new generation of interactive TV,” Stephen Petheram, Microsoft TV’s director of media services for the EMEA and APAC regions. “They show the potential of connected TV powered by Microsoft Mediaroom to deliver consumer experiences that seamlessly blend real-time content and services from the Internet and private data sources with broadcast TV.”