Microsoft looks to be TV player, again...
Microsoft has spent the last decade trying to crack the TV market with billion-dollar investments in cable and telecom companies, numerous attempts at moving into the set-top box with limited success and an acquisition of WebTV, a service to allow people to browse the Internet through a TV set.
None of these investments delivered the results Microsoft had hoped: a prominent place near the couch.
This time, Microsoft thinks the technology infrastructure and, more importantly, the consumers are finally ready for IPTV, an application that is one of the most complicated ever run on computer servers.
IPTV, along with Microsoft's Xbox video game console and its Zune portable media player, is part of the company's push to move beyond the office and into the living room.
"IPTV is a huge growth initiative. It's huge for us, it's huge for our partners," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told analysts in July. "Count the number of TVs (and) you don't have to get a lot of money per TV per year to start feeling kind of excited about the size of the opportunity."
Industry research firm Gartner predicts the number of global IPTV subscribers to reach 49 million and revenue to top $13 billion in 2010. Last year, three million IPTV subscribers generated revenue of about $400 million.
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