Microsoft TV is trumpeting the apparent success of its Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform. According to a November 10th announcement by the company, the number of subscribers to Mediaroom-powered IPTV services has more than doubled during the past year: Mediaroom-powered IPTV is now in over 2 million subscriber homes, the company says, and on nearly 4 million set-top boxes worldwide. And, in the past quarter alone, the company claims, Mediaroom customers have connected 500,000 new subscribers worldwide.
Microsoft TV claims that the accelerated growth rate has occurred at the same time as customers have begun to maximize the functionality of Mediaroom in their IPTV deployments, turning on such features as personalized weather and sports information, the ability to play back standard- and high-definition recorded programming on any connected TV in the home, and the ability to set a DVR remotely via a PC or mobile device. In September, for example, AT&T, whose Mediaroom-powered U-verse service claimed 781,000 subscribers at the end of the third quarter, launched a service called Total Home DVR, based on Mediaroom's DVR Anywhere technology, and has now rolled it out to its entire footprint. "AT&T U-verse TV delivers a new and exciting consumer experience that gives AT&T the edge to compete and grow market share in a highly competitive TV market," G.W. Shaw, AT&T executive director of U-verse marketing, said in a prepared statement. "Take Total Home DVR, for example. Because of our flexible software platform, we were able to download this powerful new feature directly to consumers' homes overnight and to further differentiate versus cable."
Microsoft also says that it has expanded its Mediaroom partner ecosystem via the recent qualification (by the Microsoft Interoperability and Qualification Lab) of the Harmonic ProStream 2000 digital video splicer and the Envivio 4Caster C4 three-screen multichannel, multiprofile encoder. In addition, the company is trumpeting the results of a recent study by monitoring solutions specialist, Witbe, that found Mediaroom-powered services to have the fastest channel-changing speeds of any TV services tested globally.
