Microsoft Launches Mediaroom IPTV Platform With Virtualization Support

Microsoft’s award-winning Microsoft Mediaroom Internet Protocol Television and multimedia software platform launched with virtualization Wednesday. That makes Mediaroom the first IPTV platform to offer virtualization support, according to the company.

Mediaroom with virtualization offers a significant reduction in server hardware and operator costs for small deployments. Virtualization support makes it possible to deploy and manage a full Mediaroom-powered TV service for up to 30,000 subscriber homes per market using less than 10 physical servers.

“Mediaroom with virtualization provides the industry’s lowest platform footprint for deploying a full IPTV service,” said Andreas Mueller-Schubert, GM for the TV, video and music business at Microsoft.  “The reduction in capital expenditure and ongoing efficiencies make Mediaroom with virtualization an attractive proposition for operators of all sizes as they launch and grow their IPTV businesses.”

Microsoft is using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to power virtualization in Mediaroom. Virtual servers share the physical server’s resources of memory, disk access and CPU cycles.