When we talk about IPTV, we refer in particular to the commercial distribution of television content using IP networks – usually the same internet – by telecommunications companies, which until recently were not in the world of television services.
These companies mostly lack backend platforms on which to mount video services, have trouble ensuring an acceptable quality of service, and lack protocols to measure these quality levels. Finally, they face a problem of cultural differences of their staff (technical, administrative and commercial), which comes with a trajectory in the field of data transmission, but with little or no experience in the field of video. But all this is changing.
Microsoft, to cite one of the main providers in this field, offers the Mediaroom platform, which allows telecommunications companies to provide IPTV services to users' televisions and computers. Thanks to Mediaroom, subscribers can receive programs, movies and sports in high definition with additional services such as an electronic guide on the screen, DVR and video on demand, fast channel switching and the ability to watch up to six channels at a time. Mediaroom also integrates computer services into the TV allowing you to share photos, videos and music streams directly to the TV.
Enrique Rodríguez, vice president of Microsoft TV, stated during NAB that the services provided by Mediaroom have more than two and a half million subscribers (out of a total of about fifteen million IPTV subscribers worldwide, as cited by other sources) and that these are now not limited to telecommunications service providers but are open to providers of cable under the DOCSIS standard.
Recently, Microsoft added an advertising component to the Mediaroom platform, which allows "telcos" to generate additional income to that from subscriptions or the rental of movies in VoD service. Cable companies have long had that extra source of revenue by inserting ads of their own. In contrast, telecommunications companies that started in the IPTV business lacked this capability. The Mediaroom Advertising Platform is a middleware that will be available in the coming months and promises to compete with the way Google inserts its ads on the Internet. Thanks to this product, advertisers will be able to put their ads on television and continue their campaigns on the web and mobile devices with measurable results and statistics. The first component of the platform is responsible for the insertion of ads in the programming. Another component is responsible for the administration of the campaign and the collection of data on the habits of consumers of a certain telecommunications company to determine the effectiveness of the campaign.
In another area of the invasion of IP technologies in the television industry, during the last NAB exhibition, Microsoft invited several partners to jointly present solutions for the audiovisual media industry based on Microsoft platforms for the development of information technology applications (See additional notes).
