microsoft

Canadian telco, Telus, has launched a new version of its Telus TV service in Western Canada that is based on the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform. The company says that the service is initially available in and around Edmonton and in 40 or so communities in British Columbia and Alberta, and will be expanded over time. Customers of Telus's earlier implementation of Telus TV, which is powered by Minerva Networks' IPTV platform, will have the opportunity to upgrade over the coming months, the company says. "We're excited that Telus has chosen Microsoft Mediaroom as the platform for their next-generation Telus TV service," Andreas Mueller-Schubert, general manager of Microsoft's TV and Video Platforms Business, said in a prepared statement.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against TiVo in a San Francisco federal court, claiming that the DVR company has infringed upon two of its US patents--which cover technologies for securely purchasing and delivering video and for displaying programmable information respectively, Bloomberg reported yesterday. Microsoft, which claims that TiVo is illegally using the technologies described by the patents in its set-top boxes, its software and its subscription service, is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order to prevent TiVo from using the technologies.

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new, post-TVOT EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

Due to the volume of news generated by last week's Consumer Electronics Show, and because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

Microsoft on Wednesday launched version 2.0 of its Mediaroom IPTV platform, billing it as "enabl[ing] TV service operators to provide their TV services to more subscribers than ever before, delivering more content to more screens than the previous version of Mediaroom--both inside and outside the home."

The BBC has announced the line-up of content that will be available through its red-button interactive TV service for the next two weeks and beyond:

[itvt] has just published interviews with Sezmi co-founder, chairman and president, Phil Wiser, and with Microsoft Xbox Live general manager, Marc Whitten.

Wiser discusses Sezmi's platform (a set-top box-based offering which the company bills as "combining traditional TV content, movies and Internet video in a single, easy-to-use product and service"), its programming partnerships and its various interactive, social and content-discovery capabilities; the company's monetization strategy and roadmap for the

[itvt] can today reveal the winners of the Mediaroom Application Contest that Microsoft held at its 3rd Annual Mediaroom Developers Conference last month (note: Mediaroom is Microsoft's IPTV platform, which the company says has now been deployed in over 4 million subscriber households worldwide, by a customer base that includes AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom and Portugal Telecom, among others).

Microsoft said Monday that "1 vs. 100 Live," the avatar-driven interactive TV version of the Endemol-developed "1 vs. 100" game show format that it beta launched on its Xbox Live service this spring, is proving highly popular, having been downloaded by over 2.5 million people (which makes it one of the top-10 Xbox Live content downloads to date), and with up to 200,000 people around the world playing it every day. In one evening alone, the company says, over 215,000 people in Europe and 230,000 in North America "dressed their avatars" to participate in the interactive game show.

UK incumbent telco BT announced Tuesday that BT Vision, its Microsoft Mediaroom-powered, interactive TV-enabled hybrid IPTV service (note: the service is enabled via a hybrid set-top box that allows viewers to access linear channels from the UK's free-to-air digital terrestrial platform, Freeview, alongside IP-delivered on-demand and interactive content), has launched an interactive TV dating service in partnership with Match.com.

DVD rental service provider, Netflix, last week announced another over-the-top deal for its service with a consumer electronics company: starting in the fall, subscribers to Netflix's unlimited plan (priced from $8.99 per month) will be able to instantly watch more than 12,000 streamed movies and TV episodes on Sony Electronics' Bravia Internet-connected HDTV sets, as well as on previous Bravia models equipped with Sony's Bravia Internet video link module, the company said. The other CE companies that have recently signed OTT deals with Netflix are Microsoft (for the Xbox 360), LG Electronics, Roku, Samsung, TiVo and Vizio. "Sony has been a world leader in consumer electronics for decades," Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, said in a prepared statement.

Following a similar deal with UK pay-TV provider, BSkyB, that was announced earlier this month (see the article posted on itvt.com, June 11th), Microsoft on Monday announced a deal with French pay-TV provider, Canal+, that the companies say will make a range of Canal+'s live and VOD content--including over 3,000 on-demand films, as well as TV shows and soccer games--available to France's approximately 1 million Xbox 360 users via Microsoft's Xbox LIVE content service.

Microsoft and advertising/communications giant, Publicis Groupe, last week announced a broad agreement to cooperate closely on three advertising-related "core objectives" that they say have been "enabled by the emergence of the digital media world." The "core objectives" center on content, performance and audience respectively.

Deutsche Telekom, the German incumbent telco that offers the Microsoft Mediaroom-powered IPTV service, T-Home Entertain, announced Thursday that it has launched a service that allows customers to store videos, photos, music and other personal media files, as well as personal contact lists and email, "centrally and securely" in a "Media Center" located on its networks, and then access them and play them back through their TV, mobile phone or PC. The service, which was announced at CeBIT in February, also allows them to share their content with their family and friends, the company says.