Microsoft News Tracker

Generally overlooked last week at NAB2007, the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, was the demonstration by Microsoft Research and partner Skinkers of LiveStation: Interactive live TV on the PC that works! The Gartner Group’s Allen Weiner explains:

Certainly not as physically large as the display at the large broadcast engineering booths at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB2007), but of perhaps greater significance, is LiveStation. LiveStation is an effort from U.K.-based Skinkers, a firm that builds and manages RSS delivery ecosystems. It is alpha-testing a new system for delivering an unlimited number of live TV channels to the desktop. The solution is software-based and is built on top of Pastry, a peer-to-peer technology developed by Microsoft Research primarily in its Cambridge, U.K., labs. This flavor of P2P is secure and robust, requires less server-side infrastructure, because of its ability to optimize the network, and is suited for live streaming, while most P2P applications are focused on the on-demand streaming market.

The demo of LiveStation, which showed a good-quality picture from the BBC in the midst of a bandwidth-hogging tech show, has another thing going for it - its ability to leverage Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform to create “content experiences” based on LiveStation’s streams. Has interactive TV finally found its way to the consumer?

There’s more by following the link including that Microsoft is an equity partner in Skinkers. If you want to try LiveStation for yourself, you can apply here.

If you are still running a beta copy of Vista, Microsoft wants you to know that all good things come to an end:

Microsoft Corp. today spelled out exactly how users of Windows Vista betas and release candidates can shift to the final code, and warned that beginning June 1, preview-equipped PCs will automatically reboot every two hours.

Notifications will start going out today to users of Vista Ultimate Beta 2, Release Candidate 1 (RC1) and RC2 of the upcoming expiration, a company spokeswoman said. “Customers will have ample time to back up data and migrate their PCs to the final version of Windows Vista,” she said.

If you didn’t do the sensible thing and install the Vista beta on a real or virtual test machine that you can just wipe, you may have a lot of backing up to do to preserve your data. More details by following the link and at Microsoft’s Vista web site.

Meanwhile, Windows Vista got what can only be described as a service pack except that it is for Media Center only. The April 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista fixes a number of problems and it adds:

• Online Media support has been added for Windows Media Center on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate
• Video Playlist support has been added for Windows Media Center Extenders
• Improvements have been made to Online Media caching

Finally, back in February I mentioned in passing the problem that Nvidia was having shipping working Vista graphics drivers despite supposedly having certified drivers. Now there’s a new group contemplating a class action lawsuit against Nvidia.

Everyone enjoys a good lawyer joke including Fortune’s David Parloff:

When Google (GOOG) announced its $3.1 billion proposed acquisition of DoubleClick on April 13, recovering monopolists Microsoft (MSFT) and AT&T (T) were the most vociferous complainants urging regulators to scrutinize the deal.

Alluding to the irony, I asked Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith last week if he’d be hiring David Boies, of Boies Schiller & Flexner, to counsel his company on the antitrust issues. It was Boies, of course, who had sliced and very nearly diced Microsoft seven years ago as lead trial attorney for the government in its monopolization case against Microsoft.

“Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me,” Smith said, but he sounded intrigued, and asked me to have Boies call him if he seemed interested after I spoke to him.

Parloff followed up with Boies and discovered that AT&T had already hired the firm as their DoubleClick complainers. My, how the worm turns.

Elizabeth Montalbano for IDG News Service spots Steve Ballmer telegraphing the arrival of Microsoft’s hit on the lucrative corporate client security market:

The business client security product Microsoft has been working on since 2003 will finally make its debut in May, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday.

Speaking at a technology event near Amsterdam, Ballmer said that Forefront Client Security, Microsoft’s antivirus and antispyware product for business desktops, will be available “in the next month.” The product has been in beta testing for more than a year, and the company’s most recent target for final release is by the end of June.

Ballmer characterized the product, which is a combination of products acquired from other companies and Microsoft in-house development, as an all-in-one security product for PCs in a business environment. “It really does do hygiene, security, antivirus all the way down to the client level,” he said.
…
Ballmer also said that even as Microsoft continues efforts to make its software more inherently secure, there likely will always be a need for additional and third-party security products for the most reliable protection of IT systems. This is why the company opted to build its own security line.

It probably didn’t hurt that they spotted some money on the table. The odd thing, of course, is that while most desktop security companies offer a business version of their products, it is generally only mildly modified from the consumer product. Microsoft on the other hand has two completely separate products with different heritages with Forefront Client Security for business and Windows Live OneCare for consumers.