CES: Microsoft celebrates IPTV success, adds apps

Mediaroom poised to reach 1 million customers in 2008

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Bill Gates kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show this week with encouraging news for skeptical IPTV followers. Despite initial setbacks and general uncertainty surrounding the relatively nascent technology, Microsoft Mediaroom is now being deployed in 1 million set-top-boxes worldwide, and its service provider customers are adding two new IPTV subscriber households every minute.

Back in October, the service boasted 100,000 customers--double the number of subscribers from June. According to the company, however, the Mediaroom platform is now on pace to reach 1 million subscriber homes in the first quarter of 2008--an accomplishment that is significant not just for Microsoft but for the industry as a whole, according to Vince Vittore, senior analyst with the Yankee Group.

“This is a good sign for the industry,” he said in an email interview. “Surpassing 1 million STBs is largely symbolic, but it's also an indication that we really are moving out of the science experiment phase of IPTV. Reaching that level also is influenced by Microsoft's customer base, which is almost entirely tier-one carriers. Most other middleware vendors cut their teeth on the tier-two and tier-three market and then move up to tier one.”

According to Christine Heckart, general manager of marketing for Microsoft TV, Microsoft’s success is also attributable to its timing in entering the industry. The company entered the IPTV market in 2003 touting its one-stop, clean solution, a prospect that appealed to large service providers fed up with smaller providers who couldn’t deliver the results they were hoping for.

“We had a real competitive advantage entering the market as we did after the 2000 era,” Heckart said. “We could create an architecture that assumed everything on demand from the beginning. It assumed a connected and personal experience.”

Mediaroom is currently deployed or being trialed by more than 20 service providers worldwide on four continents and 18 countries, the company said. In an effort to continue the recent success Microsoft has garnered, the IPTV provider also announced the addition of several new features and services for customers, including the ability to simultaneously record multiple standard- and high-definition TV channels, personal media-sharing and whole-home and remote DVR, offering consumers the ability to watch recordings on any screen, including switching between screens mid-recording.

Heckart said that Mediaroom’s new applications allow the TV to participate in the broader social network that consumers have built without having to rebuild it on the television. “The real theme here is that it just makes it easier to get their favorite programs, music, movies, photos from the best screen in their home, which is usually the television,” she said.

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