Microsoft adds Interactive Capabilities

Microsoft announced new capabilities for its Mediaroom Telco IPTV software system at CES that included:

• DVR Anywhere that provides the ability to watch their recorded programs on any TV in the home. The viewer could begin watching a movie in the living room, resume viewing it on the kitchen TV during dinner, and finish watching the same movie in the bedroom. It will be possible to watch the same or different recorded programs from multiple TVs in the home simultaneously while recording other shows to be viewed later.
• NASCAR on TNT provides the ability to choose between several different live in-car driver cameras and driver audio, while simultaneously watching the main race.
• Showtime Interactive Boxing provides the ability to choose between several live audio feeds while watching the boxing match.
• CNN election coverage provides the ability to access the richness of CNN.com’s 2008 election coverage while watching CNN’s television broadcast and participate in interactive straw votes.

In addition, at CES Microsoft will show an application called My Pad, designed and built by emuse technologies, that connects viewers to their social networks through the TV via Windows Live services and also enables them to share personal pages that exist online and on the TV. Microsoft and ChoiceStream Inc. will demonstrate a personalized TV and video-on-demand recommendations application tailored to each viewer’s unique tastes and preferences.

These are the kinds of capabilities that Telco IPTV needs in order to differentiate it from cable services, particularly in markets were cable services are particularly strong. The ability to provide advanced applications and capabilities is a primary reason why so many large service providers selected Mediaroom in the first place.