Microsoft today launched Microsoft Mediaroom with virtualization, making it the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform to offer virtualization support. Mediaroom with virtualization can deliver up to a sixfold reduction in the number of physical servers required to support a full-featured IPTV service, significantly reducing hardware and management costs and speeding time to market for Mediaroom customers by up to three weeks.
With virtualization support, it is possible to deploy and operate a full Mediaroom-powered TV service for up to 30,000 subscriber homes per market using fewer than 10 physical servers. Even for deployments of greater than 30,000 subscriber homes, a mix of virtualized and dedicated servers can still provide efficiency benefits.
Mediaroom with virtualization offers the full functionality of Microsoft’s award-winning IPTV platform including video on demand, DVR Anywhere for viewing and managing recorded shows in any room, and Mediaroom Anytime for viewing of previously aired programs or restarting currently airing shows without any preplanning or prior digital video recording. Other capabilities include high-definition video for live and on-demand content, multiview, instant channel zapping, and TV applications that support rich interactivity and seamless blending of Web content and services with broadcast TV.
To power virtualization in Mediaroom, Microsoft is using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization technology.