Mediaroom is now ominously in sight of 4 million customers Microsoft said this week and that its operators are beginning to introduce interactive TV apps and ‘triple-screen’ services. We say ominously because its once delayed operators partners are now high growth, while Mediaroom casts its eyes around at new targets in hybrid cable and among smaller telcos.
A year ago at IBC, Mediaroom had only just reached 1.5 million homes so this represents a doubling of its penetration and almost 2 million of those homes are in what it calls EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa. Microsoft says that it will pass 4 million in October.
In the past six months du (UAE), Beeline (Russia), Hellas Online (Greece) and SureWest (USA) have all been design wins for Mediaroom while existing operators, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, Portugal Telecom, AT&T and others have all reported subscriber growth ahead of the market.
Mediaroom reports that in July Deutsche Telekom launched a triple screen cloud-based service for its Entertain customers so they could store videos, photos, music and other personal media files, as well as personal contact lists and email, in the Media Center and access them and play them back through their TV, mobile phone or PC. Entertain has also added exclusive Bundesliga VoD soccer content. This is what it means by extra services now being added.
HD is seen as a key growth driver for Deutsche Telekom’s Entertain. “German consumers have a big appetite for HD content and by delivering a wide choice of compelling live and on-demand HD content we are accelerating mass market appeal for the Entertain service,’ says Christian Illek, Head of Marketing T-Home, Deutsche Telekom.
Microsoft now says it is able to go after smaller telcos and that it has also proven the viability over a DOCSIS cable infrastructure with the launch earlier this year of Guangzhou Digital Media Group’s Zhujiang Digital service.
Microsoft says it has also added virtualization support for Mediaroom to reduce costs for smaller operators and that Reservation Telephone Cooperative in the US and Viapass in France are the first customers to sign up to what appears to be a hosted version.