Microsoft Mediaroom outlines interactive IPTV strategy

Shari Barnett

Part 5 of 6 – read part 1 and part 2 and part 3 and part 4 here.

Microsoft’s Mediaroom and its Presentation Framework, a multimedia application environment supported by Alcatel-Lucent, has clearly been the source of innovation for its biggest customer, AT&T U-Verse, but thus far, it’s been anything but an open platform. Despite that, the company does attract a group of 65 app developers focused on bringing new interactive applications and widgets to the TV screen. Shari Barnett, Microsoft’s marketing director of applications for the TV, video & music business group, spoke with Telephony about what this group has in store and the possibility of opening up the platform to let more developers get in on the action.

On making the TV a Web portal: We just released what we think is our most powerful platform as part of a client and server upgrade in December. Our customers are just starting to deploy this upgrade of Mediaroom software now. It enables them to create apps that are very flexible. They can look and feel almost any way, and they really allow the set-top box, and therefore the TV, to be a portal to any kind of Web service. It can run the gamut of something simple like a widget for weather, headlines or horoscopes to something very integrated with the video for voting or interactivity with a show to see additional scenes and outtakes. We are tapping into existing Web services and pulling content from there. There’s this always-on broadband connection, and we might as well use it.

On making it into Mediaroom’s community: The way our program works is our customers are welcome to nominate anyone they want – any development house they might want to work with – and we just sign an NDA and offer an app development kit and access to the developer Web site. We also nominate companies we’ve worked with in the past and new companies we think are exciting or can offer interesting apps or system integrators and content companies interested in working with future platforms to take advantage of it for their businesses – a wide variety of folks. The only reason we don’t open it up real broadly is because we can only offer a limited amount of support. We have a team of engineers there to work with developers. We cannot expand it exponentially, so we are narrowing it down to folks we know our customers know are serious about developing.