During the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft announced: “Microsoft Unites Software and Cloud Services to Power New TV Experiences“, which describes the release of Mediaroom 2.0, Microsoft’s IPTV software suite:
LAS VEGAS — Jan. 6, 2010 — Today at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Microsoft Corp. is announcing Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0, the next version of the world’s most deployed Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform. [...]
The term “cloud” is sprinkled throughout the announcement, though it doesn’t elaborate on how Mediaroom actually relates to cloud computing:
“Mediaroom 2.0 is scheduled to be available for operators to start testing beginning next month. Mediaroom 2.0 can be deployed by operators as their entertainment cloud powering the delivery of a complete television service…”
The implications of an “entertainment cloud” sound interesting, and the concept appears to be a step in the direction of what we describe in our post entitled “Cable in the Cloud”.
The relationship to cloud computing and virtualization is further described in a press release earlier this year entitled “Microsoft Mediaroom First to Bring Virtualization to IPTV”:
REDMOND, Wash. – May 27, 2009 – Microsoft Corp. today launched Microsoft Mediaroom with virtualization, making Mediaroom the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform to offer virtualization support. Mediaroom with virtualization can deliver up to a sixfold reduction in the number of physical servers required to support a full-featured IPTV service, significantly reducing hardware and management costs and speeding time to market for Mediaroom customers by up to three weeks. [...]
The press release comes with the usual customer testimonials, but it comes as no surprise that cloud related technologies are finding its way into video delivery infrastructures.
The CES announcement also describes how Mediaroom 2.0 incorporates Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming technology, their version of rate adaptive streaming. This technology addresses one of the more distressing aspects of online video delivery: bandwidth volatility in non-QOS managed network connections. There are a number of competing approaches to addressing the bandwidth volatility issues, for example, Move Networks was an early mover on this topic. H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a potential step towards standardization, though it is important to recognize that much of the functionality associated with rate adaptive streaming resides in upper and lower level protocols.
Cable in the cloud concepts are clearly beginning to emerge along the lines we describe in our posts.