Time Warner, Comcast to trial Microsoft TV software

After throwing its marketing might, development resources and billions of investment dollars trying -- and failing -- to gain traction in the market for cable television software, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer Monday announced that U.S. cable television heavyweights Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp. plan to conduct field trials of the company's new family of TV set-top box software.


The vote of support, however tentative it might be, is important for Microsoft because its set-top box software has not yet been deployed widely. Even though it is on its second generation of TV software and has spent more than $10 billion buying stakes in companies to spur investment and growth in the cable TV industry, to date only a handful of operators -- and no large U.S. cable companies -- have rolled out Microsoft TV software.

Time Warner and Comcast are the first large U.S. companies to commit to testing the new family of software in the field. Time Warner will test Microsoft's TV Interactive Program Guide (IPG) software in Beaumont, Texas, according to the announcement by Ballmer, made in Seattle at CTAM Summit 03, the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing's conference. A timeframe for the trial has not been made public, according to Microsoft officials.

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The Comcast and Time Warner trials do not mean, however, that Microsoft has finally found success in the TV market. A Comcast spokesman Monday stressed that the trials of IPG and Foundation were "limited" and cautioned that the company has not made a commitment to deploying the software commercially.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/07/21/HNtwcomcast_1.html

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