In Part 1 of this two-part Q&A, Ben Huang, product management director with Microsoft Mediaroom, talks with xchange Editor in Chief Paula Bernier about AT&T’s announcement earlier this week that it will slow its U-verse rollout as well as the first announced cable TV company to use Mediaroom.
xchange: For those not familiar with Microsoft Mediaroom, give us a brief primer.
Huang: Our product from the get-go was really designed for broadband service providers to go ahead and get into the TV business so they can offer a next-generation TV service for the consumers. From the beginning, we targeted telcos initially — people like AT&T in the U.S., British Telecom in the U.K., DT in Germany. Currently, we have a little shy of 30 customers worldwide; a little over 15 of those have already commercially deployed in their respective countries.
xchange: Did you always call the product Mediaroom?
Huang: No. When we first went out with the product around the 2004 timeframe it was called IPTV Edition. We got into the business a few years ago with the Mediaroom product, aka IPTV Edition back then. We knew there was a big trend around IP and using IP to power a ton of different services. We saw there was a window of opportunity of different types of service providers who wanted to really take advantage of a lot of things that IP enables — like not only improving the TV experience, but connecting the TV experience to all the dynamics that were happening on the Internet and all these IP-based devices that are showing up in our lives, like PCs, portable devices. And so we got a lot of good traction since then.
xchange: What kind of traction?
Huang: It took us up until June of last year to get up to about 1 million subscriber households across our customer footprint. Then at CES a few weeks ago we announced that we had gotten to a little shy of 2.5 million subscriber households. So a few years to get to that first million subscriber households, and basically another six months after that to rack up another million-and-a-half on top of that.
xchange: AT&T this week announced plans to slow the rollout of U-verse in a move to cut capex by 10 to 15 percent. How will that affect Microsoft?
Huang: I’m not sure it’s affecting us too much. U-verse said for calendar year of 2008 they wanted to get to a million subs, which they did. In Q4 alone they added about 264,000 subs, so they’re going at a pretty good clip. So they’ll continue that clip into this calendar year as well. The nice thing is, in terms of their available market that’s addressable by Mediaroom, that cup is not filled up yet, so there’s still a lot of room for them to grow just even in the markets they’ve enabled to be addressable by Mediaroom.
