Microsoft has announced that its Mediaroom IPTV middleware has more than doubled in the last 12 months and now stands at almost four million set-top boxes deployed in two million subscriber homes. In the last quarter alone some 500,000 homes have been connected.
The technology has reach a key tipping point with subscriber numbers reaching a critical mass that has allowed the deployment of the much-touted advanced features such as personalised weather, sports, and news; and personal video recorder functionality.
AT&T in the United States has been a key driver of Microsoft Mediaroom and by the end of the third quarter had 781,000 subscribers alone. One million deployments have been made in Europe.
However, the Microsoft numbers remain dwarfed by the established digital TV middleware providers OpenTV and NDS, which at the end of the third quarter had 115.8 million and 98.7 million clients deployed respectively. The Swedish Dreampark claims the highest number of operator deployments in Europe, though its targeting is different from that of Microsoft, which has focused on the Tier 1 operators.
