Microsoft Announces New IPTV Features, Renames Product Mediaroom

This morning, Microsoft announced that it had updated its IPTV software platform, providing several new capabilities and renamed the product Mediaroom. The new capabilities include music and photo sharing, picture-in-picture capabilities, digital terrestrial television support and mostly importantly, an application development toolkit. Opening up the platform is a crucial step for Microsoft as it now allows developers access to a once closed system and gives them an opportunity to develop new applications for Mediaroom.

Microsoft’s press release states that "more than 18 of the world’s leading service providers have selected the Microsoft Mediaroom platform for their digital TV offerings, and commercial deployments are currently underway with 10 providers."

At the time of this posting, both the www.microsoftmediaroom.com and www.microsoft.com/TV websites were not working and giving directory listing errors.

While we’re on the subject of IPTV, I think there is a lot of confusion as to what an IPTV service offering is and how that ties into streaming media technology and the online video industry. I hear the term IPTV and Internet TV used in the same manner but it’s important to remember that IPTV is a closed network, the Internet is not. The two are very different technologies and distribution platforms.