What's in an IPTV Trial?

Participants in the early-adopter program for Microsoft TV IPTV Edition conduct trials in three phases.

Lab phase. The first phase is conducted in a laboratory setting. During this phase, service providers figure out how to integrate IPTV Edition servers with their existing systems, such as billing and provisioning systems or Teletext services (simple text-based information services created in the 1970s and still popular in many parts of Europe).

“Friendly” phase. In the second phase, IPTV Edition clients are deployed to homes of a few company employees or other “friendly” households. This phase helps Microsoft and the provider uncover any problems with the set-top box software or delivery system that were not revealed in the lab. For example, during this phase, Indian provider Reliance Infocomm discovered that customers with fluorescent lighting had trouble using the remote controls to change channels on the set-top boxes—a problem that the set-top manufacturer was able to resolve. Swiss provider Bluewin discovered and resolved other problems, such as incompatibilities between the hardware-based video encoder provided by Tandberg Television and the IPTV set-top box provided by Thomson, and occasional crashes of the set-top box software.