Comcast Announces Broad Microsoft TV Software Deployment
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Comcast Cable this month will turn up the first US commercial deployment of Microsoft TV Foundation Edition, a digital cable software platform that includes an interactive program guide and supports dual-tuner digital video recording (DVR) services.
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Microsoft Corp. unveiled on Sunday a new brand name for its Internet-based television platform, a service deployed by 10 companies including AT&T Inc.
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Microsoft announced on Tuesday a program that will pay some transition costs for companies that want to move from Novell&#39;s NetWare operating system onto servers running Windows.
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Microsoft TV's IPTV channel guide can search programs and offer descriptions.
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Microsoft Corp., world&#39;s largest software company, is planning to launch 2005 version of their Media Center software program on Oct. 12.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is increasing the range of video formats that PCs running its Windows software can pipe to televisions around the home, with support for a new range of Extenders for Windows Media Center devices from hardware manufacturers. It expects companies such as Cisco Systems, D-Link, and Niveus Media to reveal new set-top boxes next month that can play videos or music stored on a PC running the Home Premium or Ultimate editions of Windows Vista. Microsoft's software will stream video in previously unsupported formats such as DivX and Xvid, delivering it to devices around the home over wired or wireless networks. The new Extender devices could even be capable of streaming "protected" high-definition (HD) video over the latest 802.11n wireless networks, Microsoft said Thursday. Vendors or broadcasters of HD content can protect it from piracy by using DRM (digital rights management) software to restrict the devices on which it can be displayed or stored. Microsoft's reasoning in developing these capabilities is that customers want to access the content on their multimedia PCs when they're not in front of the PC. AppleÂ realized this in 2004, when it released the diminutive AirPort Express Wi-Fi router with an audio-out socket for streaming music over a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection from a Macintosh or PC running its iTunes jukebox software, but the following year Microsoft went one better with an add-on pack called Windows Media Center Extender allowing its Xbox game consoles to stream music and video from a Windows Media Center PC. Manufacturers and buyers have been slow to take an interest in Microsoft's Windows Media Center Extender platform. The best-known Extender is Microsoft's own Xbox 360 game console, of which market-watchers estimate Microsoft has sold around 10 million since its November 2005 launch. By comparison, D-Link said in June 2006 that it had sold just 100,000 of its MediaLounge wireless media players in the first 18 months they were on sale. But Microsoft is still pushing the idea, now rebranded Extenders for Windows Media Center, collaborating with Cisco, D-Link, and Niveus to link their set-top boxes to Vista PCs. In the future, the company plans to work with a broader range of vendors to incorporate the same capabilities directly into other devices such as DVD players and televisions. There's more to it than a change of name, though: in its Windows Media Center Extender FAQ, Microsoft warns that devices based on the old specification, developed to work with Windows XP, will no longer work with the new system for Windows Vista.
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Microsoft unveiled a new product designed to more tightly integrate its back-end Dynamics business applications with its desktop Office suite.
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Microsoft Tuesday released a handful of software products that are key elements in its drive to develop a comprehensive management platform for Windows.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O is making a renewed push this week to get its software into living rooms with the launch of a new version of its Windows XP Media Center, a personal
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Microsoft has released tools designed to help enterprises deploy Windows Vista more easily.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft released its first software designed specifically to manage virtual machines on a network ThursdayÂ and tweaked licensing for its system-management products to take into account virtualization. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, which has been in the works for about a year and a half, has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available in October as part of Microsoft's System Server Management Center suite of products, the company said. The new product is built on the same architecture as other products in the enterprise version of the suite -- which include Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, and Configuration Manager -- and is aimed specifically at managing virtual machines in a data center that runs Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, the current version of Microsoft's server virtualization technology, said Patrick O'Rourke, group manager, Windows Infrastructure. "Customers now can use the same tools to manage both virtual and physical assets [on the network]," he said. Microsoft also has changed the licensing model for its for its System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise, making it available for $860 per host server -- which means the actual server that hosts any instances of virtual software -- plus two years of Microsoft's Software Assurance plan. Previously, System Center software was licensed per device being managed in the data center, O'Rourke said. The new licensing should make managing virtualized environments with Microsoft's software more cost-effective for customers, he said. Microsoft has been developing and fine-tuning its virtualization strategy over the past several years to keep up with virtualization leader VMWare and others, as well as to serve the needs of large customers who increasingly are using virtualization in their data centers. However, the company's strategy has predictably hit some road bumps. Microsoft is developing next-generation virtualization technology, code-named Viridian, that takes advantage of virtualization-optimized processors from Intel and AMD and will help keep the company up to speed with competitors. However, though Viridian will be a component of Windows Server 2008, it won't be available until six months after that new OS is released. And because Microsoft recently pushed back the release of Windows Server 2008 to the first quarter of next year, Viridian's release is nearly a year away. The company also decided earlier this year to pull out some originally planned features of Viridian due to timing concerns. In the meantime, customers can use a combination of Microsoft's stand-alone Virtual Server and its System Center products to install and manage both virtual and physical machines in the data center. Microsoft also is planning a mid-market version of Virtual Machine Manager, called Workgroup edition, for release in January. The software will cost $499 per host server. Microsoft also plans to extend the capabilities of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager so that it not only supports Windows Server virtualization technologies but also third-party virtualization from VMware and XenSource Inc., O'Rourke said. A beta of that software is expected to be available around the same time as Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft plans to update its roadmap then as well.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft released its first software designed specifically to manage virtual machines on a network Thursday&#160;and tweaked licensing for its system-management products to take into account virtualization.
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Comcast trials will provide a big clue about the software giant's prospects for cable success.
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SBC Communications Inc. will use a Microsoft Corp. software system to transmit television over high-speed Internet connections like the ones SBC will offer after replacing the local arteries of its copper telephone network with fiber-optic cables.
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TiVo Inc , a maker of digital  video recording technology, said on Thursday that the largest  U.S. cable operator Comcast Corp  had accepted its  TiVo-branded software for deployment on Comcast&#39;s DVR  platforms.
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SBC Communications plans to announce that it will pay $400 million to Microsoft for software used to deliver TV programming over high-speed data lines.
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Verizon Communications Inc. plans to use Microsoft Corp. technology for its rollout of television service over a new fiber-optic network, becoming the third major telephone company to help fulfill Microsoft's long-stymied bid to barge into the TV business.