Bill Gates last ever CES Keynote speech was last night and among other continued development announcements Microsoft announced that Mediaroom (Microsoft’s IPTV solution) has now got 1 Million Set top boxes World Wide. This is a great milestone for this new emerging technology and I’m proud to be a tiny part of it (I work in the UK Dev Test team on this product :)). Along with this Microsoft announced a continued partnership with BT which will see BT be the first to deliver Mediaroom (known to BT customers as BT Vision) via the Xbox 360, this means the Xbox 360 will be able to act as a Set Top Box for BT Vision in the UK.
Other highlights of the Keynote speech included the announcement of 10 Million subscribers to Xbox Live (including both Gold and Silver members), enhancements to the Windows Live and Zune online experiences, another look at Microsoft Surface and my personal favourite a video about Bill Gate’s last Day at work.
Monday was spent being briefly introduced to the technologies used in MSTV and how the IPTV solution worked in general. Also I got my desk cleared, a desktop PC setup and my MS login and email accounts sorted!
At 6AM Tuesday morning Matt (a current intern who is my ‘buddy’ [mentor] at MSTV until he leaves), Zach and I got a taxi to Heathrow airport for a flight to Amsterdam. The reason is that MSTV have a second European development lab in Amsterdam and the guy in charge of that is leaving next week, so we had to meet him to get an idea of how to manage the Amsterdam labs. Most of Tuesday was spent at the Amsterdam MSTV office getting to know how to manage the Amsterdam lab remotely so that we can use and organise it from back in the UK when the guy leaves.
Wednesday morning we flew back to England and got back into Reading, and then back into the office, by about 2PM. After sorting my emails and other bits out for a few hours we were then unexpectedly invited to the MSTV department social (as a few people had dropped out, we weren’t invited in the first place because the numbers had to have been confirmed a month prior), the social this month was Go Karting! So after not being back at the office for more than a few hours we went down to the local Go Karting track for a 3 hours stamina Go Karting competition. The competition was between teams which were randomly selected, there were 7 in total all with between 4-5 members from within MSTV.
Thursday and Friday consisted of a 2 day training course about the detailed architecture of IPTV. There was a lot of information to take in during these two days but it all made sense and hopefully most (if not all) of it has stuck. I’m quite impressed that I knew nothing about IPTV, its architecture or even servers in general before this course but now it all just seems logical and really quite interesting. I won’t detail any information here because, again, I don’t know how much of it is common knowledge, but what I will say is that I think it’s a very exciting (fairly) new technology which Microsoft is going to do very well with.
