Archive for January, 2007

Siemens vs. Microsoft on IPTV

Over at ITVT, there is a two part interview with representatives from Siemens and Microsoft debating their varying approaches to IPTV technologies and the market. Of course, I am biased as my team and I make many of the decisions about the Siemens approach to the market as well as many of the technology choices in our solution.

It will be very interesting to hear the Microsoft marketing machine as they respond to our perspective as captured in part one.   The Microsoft marketing machine has typically done a very good job in “responding” to critical reviews of their IPTV solution.

For those of you who don’t understand the approach Microsoft has taken in IPTV, it is classic Microsoft..  Take the best ideas from the market leaders (embrace), and modify the established approach to enhance your competitive position (extend).

For IPTV,  Microsoft used several plays from this well worn playbook. For example, Microsoft embraced much of the established ideas in IPTV, but they created a new feature they call “instant channel change” (ICC).  Before Microsoft came into the market, no one knew they needed  ”instant” channel change, but Microsoft’s marketing team has convinced many telco executives that they must have ICC.  In my view, this is not exactly the kind of disruptive feature a telco needs to convince a customer to leave cable or satellite and move to IPTV.

What Microsoft does not tell customers, is that to achieve a nearly instant channel change,  it requires a completely proprietary broadcast architecture, deviating from accepted IPTV architectures, with extensive and costly use of unicast, and a complete dependency on Microsoft technologies (codec, DRM, streaming servers etc.).  Complete technology lock in and reliance on Microsoft.  Who really benefits from instant channel change, well Microsoft, of course.  As we and others began to question the market value of such a feature, the market finally took a critical look at Microsoft’s approach.

In the end, the technological complexity (think cost, $$$) required by the Microsoft approach and the fact that it relies on Microsoft server software (which everyone knows is not even close to carrier grade), can not be justified by the business case.  Will instant channel change come to a TV near you, possibly, but a number of vendors have shown a way to achieve the same result by using a standards based approach–with no Microsoft lock in.

Instant channel change is just one example, but Microsoft has been very quiet about most of their competitive differentiators as of late.  Why?  Well, they are under the gun to get AT&T working beyond trial subscribers.

Of course the Microsoft marketing machine would have us all believe they have “launched”, well that is a matter of perspective.  My belief is that AT&T cannot deploy anywhere, anytime to any subscriber nor can they market the service at full speed because Microsoft is still working through service debilitating bugs and cannot show the scalability that AT&T needs to go full speed ahead.