FiOS TV and MSFT: When End-to-End Becomes Best of Breed

Joseph Laszlo | September 14, 2006, 02:05 PM

Interesting piece in the Journal today [subscribers only, sorry] about Verizon's tribulations with the Microsoft pieces of its FiOS infrastructure. The Journal indicates that while VZ initially planned to use MSFT for both the middleware and UI/application layers of its TV service, in practice Verizon's had to develop things like its programming guide and a music-and-photos application on its own, because apparently MSFT's stuff took too long, was too bulky, or otherwise didn't pass muster.

Quoting: "With the project in danger of running behind schedule, Verizon sent its own employees to oversee the work between Microsoft and Motorola. Engineers from all three companies had several meetings a day to nudge the project along. Eventually, Verizon took over the development of the program guide altogether from Microsoft, and ended up writing a new version of the software that was less memory-intensive."

If MSFT's not delivering on its IPTV platform promises, that's a setback for the company, although MSFT has placed so many diverse living room bets at this point (the 360...MediaCenter PCs...) that it hardly shuts them out.

But it does say interesting things about the wisdom of carriers' adopting the "platform" approach to IPTV deployments. Verizon was never going in that direction; they always aimed at best-of-breed, using different vendors for different pieces of the infrastructure. So it's probably been easier for them to change gears as difficulties with individual pieces have arisen. How much harder for telcos that put their trust in end-to-end platforms, should one piece in the middle turn out not to work as planned.