The guys over at Light Reading took a Wonka-like tour of Microsoft's two-story digital home, which the company constructed inside one of its large office buildings on the Microsoft campus. Microsoft showed off their middleware solutions and Microsoft TV CTO Peter Barrett explained that the middleware is not to blame for any slower than expected IPTV rollouts, the task of retooling a phone network to handle video is the culprit: "In terms of the service platform itself, the mechanism of delivering video, the mechanism of delivering VOD, the method of getting guide data to the software on the set-top box, with very few wrinkles all just worked out of the box," Barrett says. "We didn't rethink anything, we didn't rework anything, we didn't fix anything--it just did the job."
Barrett said building the noncomplex pieces of the network also take time, like building a data center, racking up a bunch of machines and putting the software on them. "It was getting everybody trained between Alcatel and us..." Microsoft also reiterated that its fast channel change functionality is reliant on their D servers, which sit on the edge of the network--at the central office or DSLAM--and a solution with no D servers simply reverts back to cable-like channel change speeds.
Check out more details and some pictures over at Light Reading:
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