While Mediaroom appears to have been re-invented at CES this year, much of what was announced has already been delivered to operators in bits and pieces over the years, but the fact that version 2.0 is now integrated and ready to be rolled out, will have plenty of members of the IPTV eco-system scratching their heads and trying to work out how to compete with, partner with, or avoid, the Microsoft juggernaut.
In a way, the addition last week of its now perfected IIS streaming server software (and Silverlight) to the IPTV server farm, means that all of those players offering DRM, EPG, Middleware and VoD, and claiming that they, and only they, can bring this the PC, are now having to contend with an across the board blockade of many Tier 1 Telcos, which use Mediaroom, along with many who don’t, who will now look to Microsoft for the first time to extend their services, not only to the open internet from a controlled Quality of Service internal IP network, but also to portable devices.
To date, Mediaroom deployments have been delivered over a fixed-line managed Quality of Service (QoS) IP network. By integrating IIS Smooth Streaming technology into Mediaroom 2.0, Microsoft enables operators to offer a premium, HD-quality video-on-demand service, with minimal buffering and fast startup times, even over IP-based networks of varying bandwidths.
However one line, repeated a few times in the announcement of Mediaroom 2.0, concerns us, and that is ‘coming soon on a compatible smartphone,’ as we would like to know just what this could mean.
In the past it would almost certainly have meant only Windows Mobile based smartphones, but given how friendly Nokia and Microsoft have become over the past year or so, and how they now seem to have common enemies, it may also include Symbian devices. We know it has versions of PlayReady, the new all singing, all dancing DRM, on Symbian (Playready can restrict content to a domain or home rather than a single device and can protect streams, not just files).
That’s probably about as far as Microsoft is prepared to go right now, but its clients, such as AT&T, may wish it to go a great deal further. What it needs is to be on the iPhone so that TV services you have subscribed to can be seen automatically there. Microsoft was once (and may still be) the biggest supplier of software on the Apple Mac, but when it put Word on the Mac it must have felt like it was doing a dying rival a favor. It might feel a little too much like the other way around right now.
Surely once Microsoft has decided to throw away the rulebook about only putting its applications on its own platforms, then it might just as well line up one for Android market and all the others that does the same.
That would then leave devices from RIM and Palm, not to mention platforms that are Linux based like Maemo, Moblin and LiMo. Or even simply with mobile Java clients.
But somehow we can’t see that, I still hate it that I can’t read Microsoft press releases with any other browser than Internet Explorer (at least not with Opera), that’s how anal Microsoft is on the subject of other people’s platforms, so expect little here.
Anyway back to Mediaroom 2.0. It will be with operators to start testing at the beginning of next month and Microsoft sees it as a way of taking video to the ‘cloud.’ including a cloud version of a DVR, a VoD cloud server, interactive applications, and access to both operator-hosted content and externally hosted content such as internet TV.
The other platforms are what you’d expect, a TV with a Mediaroom set-top box, a Windows Media Center PC , Web browsers on Windows-based PCs and Macs (but not Opera right?) and the Xbox 360. Plus compatible smartphones ‘ which we’ve established we are not sure about.
Microsoft also says that with Mediaroom 2.0, service providers can now offer existing VoD services to their entire broadband base including areas which are inside its broadband footprint, but not its IPTV reach. This appears not to say much, but it is an important distinction. What Microsoft is saying is that in a Quality of Service constrained environment IPTV multicasts just won’t work, because they will bounce too many packets, simply because lack of bandwidth to the edge of say DSL networks. Attenuation of the DSL signal means that often customers are outside of the reach of the exchange. But by switching them to an IIS server, with no QoS, the operator can give best effort streaming for the location.
Suddenly all those rural locations that Telcos could not reach before will come within VoD reach, and it can be done with existing set top designs. Reading between the lines the Microsoft system can also do this for broadcast content.
Microsoft is in that invidious position where it must talk to operators about moving content safely onto the internet at a time when every other supplier is talking about displaying that same internet content cheaply on a TV set. Which puts Microsoft in the position as arms dealer in a race of existing Pay TV players putting out internet content.
Unlike TV Everywhere from the cable operators, where the content has to be housed a second time on an internet server, this looks like Microsoft can deliver a different technological solution for the Telco version of TV Everywhere.
The other thing that this gives Microsoft is a way for its operators to offer IPTV to the main TV in the home and the same programming, over the internet, to other TV sets or PCs in the house, using IIS, over a constrained broadband connection.
So Mediaroom extends the reach of existing operators, stealing the oxygen from many IPTV start ups which have targeted this area, at the same time as making it possible for entirely new classes of over the top video suppliers to switch to Mediaroom. It begins to look like 2004, the year Microsoft first annexed the IPTV market, all over again.