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xchange Magazine interviews Ed Graczyk, Director of Marketing and Communications for Microsoft TV and gets an update:
XC: Refresh my memory. Which telcos now are working with Microsoft TV’s platform?
EG: Our TV platform consists of really two different product lines.
Our IPTV product line has been sold to [AT&T Inc.] and BT and Swisscom in terms of commercial agreements. We also have agreements for trials with Bell Canada, T-Online France, Reliance Infocomm in India and Telecom Italia and BellSouth [Corp.]. So there’s eight total on the IPTV front.
And then Verizon is a little bit different because the solution they’re deploying is a combination of both our IPTV product line and our cable product, which is called Microsoft TV Foundation Edition.
Then, on the cable front, Comcast [Corp.] is our biggest customer and we have a 5-million unit commercial agreement with them. And then we also have agreements with some of the leading cable operators in Latin America. In fact, about 40 percent of the Latin American digital cable market is running on Foundation Edition today. And those are all commercial agreements.
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XC: How many commercial customers are now receiving telco TV services running over the Microsoft TV platform?
EG: In terms of telco, the only one commercially deployed so far is Verizon [Communications Inc.]. And AT&T and Swisscom will both start between now and early ’06. I don’t believe [Verizon] has announced any numbers yet. You can assume they’re relatively small numbers.
More by following the link, but as has been mentioned previously, the Microsoft TV effort has been a hard slog for Microsoft and frankly, not any easier for the other players.
The Microsoft TV home page has more on the IPTV and Foundation Edition product lines as well as the lineup of Microsoft TV events at CES this week.
March 21st, 2006 at 8:25 AM
[...] As mentioned here previously([1],[2]), Windows TV (Microsoft’s IPTV offering) has had a long hard slog on the road to success, but may finally be getting there. [...]