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Verizon Steps in to Fix Microsoft's IPTV
NYGiant writes "Microsoft IPTV isn't cutting it for Verizon, Ars Technica reports, so they've taken over parts of the project. Verizon is in a rush to perfect its IPTV service, which is based on Microsoft's IPTV software. The problem is that to run well, Microsoft's software needs more memory than Verizon's set top boxes ship with. From the article: 'Under the terms of that deal, Verizon would use Microsoft's Foundation Edition middleware stack. Microsoft would also supply a set of customer-facing applications. While Foundation Edition remains in use by Verizon, the development of the other applications was taken over by Verizon engineers.'"
Should I laugh or cry?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
... film at 11
Maybe if they didn't try to squeeze in Vista Embedded...
If it's a dig at microsoft, no matter how small.... it's news on slashdot.
display the blue screen of death? It's only a joke :)
A Microsoft Product?
Late, buggy, out of spec, and bloated?
Who'da thunk?
Shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
What I don't understand is why all the major TV players are signing on with Microsoft. Every Microsoft IPTV deployment has been buggy, overbudget, late, and required significantly higher requirements than Microsoft's initial stipulations. They must be vastly underbidding everyone else on the market; I'd guess Microsoft is spending hundred of millions, if not billions, on breaking into this market.
I'd love to see one of these Microsoft IPTV deployments flop (I'm betting on SBC's deployment). That'll drive the market away from the Vole, regardless of how cheap they're willing to do the (shoddy, useless) work.
How much it feel to work in one of these Microsoft shops? How does it feel to know that cut-rate out-sourced contracted programmers from India with no background on the project did it better and faster than you? I know that India has a wealth of high-quality programmers, but the general rule is that in-house (especially at major programming shops in the U.S.) is better than out-sourced; just more expensive.
In this case, it seems that with Microsoft you pay more, and get less. Given their monopoly status, I guess that is appropriate. Monopoly-sized market distortions = inefficency. It's too bad that survival of the fittest takes so long to damage a monopoly.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I'm as virulent a Microsoft-hater as you'll find on Slashdot, but the lesson here is not that they suck (which they do, badly). It's a lesson about company A (Verizon in this case) subbing out an important business segment to company B (Microsoft, the promise-anything, and ship whatever company). If something is THAT important to your business, dammit, get it done yourself! 9 out of 10 times something goes to shit, and you either had smart lawyers (as Verizon clearly did) that at least gives you -some- chance of inconveniently, expensively bailing the project out.
The deal-making pinheads will never figure this out however, their retinas, and the brains behind them, are all fatigued from staring at Powerpoint slides and Blackberry thingies.
They have Verizon backed so far into a corner that it appears verizon can't walk away. MS is laughing all the way to the bank on this one.
The license costs that one monopoly is paying the other will, no doubt, lead to a -really- expensive set top box.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"The real goal is to figure out a way to get an 'operating system'
royalty per TV. 10's of millions of TV's per year at $10-$20 per TV
is a nice little 'operating system' business." -- Jeff Raikes of Microsoft
Just for the record, FIOS TV is not IPTV. IPTV is delivery of television over the internet. Verizon's FIOS delivers TV over fiber, than to coax--exactly as cable systems do. The difference is that the termination of the fiber in FIOS is at the side of the house, while in a traditional cable environment, the fiber is terminated further upstream (at a central office of sorts).
I guess that the Microsoft apps were not up to the level of suck that Verizon likes so they had to add the suck themselves.
It's just so darn easy to do though. Microsoft practically writes the jokes themselves.
And on a more serious note a major application provider deciding that an MS Solution is too
bloated and impractical to use is hardly small. As a developer and someone who has to carefully
help choose software and the foundation for solutions for my company I'm interested in how major
players like Verizon fare with MS software.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
So why doesn't Verizon just use Linux or some other OS that works in small constraints? If I can run Linux on my wrt54g (which is just a tiny little MIPS box with 8 megs of ram and 4 megs of flash), then they surely can ditch Microsoft's stuff altogether and use Linux.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
rolls their own client-side application. At least they have what MICROSOFT engineers think of as *standard* quality client-side software. Pretty clearcut specification failure to omit memory footprint of the client.
Software development project just like every other software development project! Microsoft beleived to be involed! Slashdot closes in!
IPTV is far from a monopolys s_cable_franchise_030906/
Yeah, and that's because the bill giving them the "national overlay" monopoly is still wending it's way through the system. http://telephonyonline.com/regulatory/news/congre
First-movers and whatever is left for cable companies in the States are dead as soon as this one passes.
And then there's:
VOIP Regulated away to the telcos/cable co's. Proverbial toll roads on the internet will be the final nail in the coffin.
CellularIs my service better or cheaper than it was 5 years ago? No. Please explain how they would jam -so- many bits down the average phone connection?
Digital Phone ServiceIs this service better or cheaper than my POTS service? As a former subscriber no. Emphatically no.
I agree they are set to see erosion of their customer base, but I would argue that they aren't meeting competitors in the marketplace, they are meeting them in Washington DC, where they have the money to raise barriers to entry. The average quickie-mart economicthink doesn't apply.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Everybody knows 640k should be enough!!
Not enough memory? Isn't that when they should be spending that extra $5 to put in another 128MB?
I fear the Y2038 bug
[rant]
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to order DSL from Verizon. Well, twice in fact.
My first order? As it turns out, they somehow lost it after I waited for a week for a response from them. So I had to reorder, via phone...
So the agent told me that DSL _was_ available for my area. Nice! I reordered it.
I waited for two weeks. After two weeks, I wrote a complaint letter (about me waiting for two weeks). Lo and behold, I got a phone call next day, from a Verizon machine, telling that my DSL order was cancelled because DSL was not available in my area.
I lived in a so-called 3rd world country for a few months. It took them 2 days to take my DSL order and activate my phone line for DSL...
[/rant]
The idea here? They are fixing Microsoft while their whole system is [beep]. Poor[*] Microsoft... O_o
[*] Not even a sarcastic comment...
That depends, is that a 16 bit thunk or one of the new windows vista 32 bit thunks?
Come on.....
MFC stood for Microsoft Fucked Class. It took quite a while before people started using it. At 1.X it was complete crap.
Many of their layers tended to be buggy, fat, and slow. Why would anyone be suprised? It is because they are a big company and the PHBs order it used. When at DTS, I had a VP that did not push Microsoft down our throats for development, but that may be because he is an MIT grad and knew the technical aspects.
Fight Spammers!
Verizon paid MS to do a job. Because MS does the same oh/same oh, Verizon found the software unusable. So rather than suing MS and getting back their money for a failed job, they are spending loads of money to have a crap system that can run better. In addition, I would guess that the Verizon ppl will turn over the code to MS. IOW, the Verizon managers are so bad, that they do not want to admit that what they bought, failed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A $5 difference in the cost of an embedded system that is being mass produced adds up to a lot of money. A change in software has a one time cost. A change in hardware is multiplied by the million or so units they plan to ship. Not to mention, reducing the memory usage may improve the overall responsiveness of the system leading to a more satisfactory user experience. In a system like this, that can go a long way to moving the units out the door.
MS gives the IPTV infrastructure away for free, or at least that's what I understand. That means back-end servers, software, etc.
It's yet another failed attempt for MS to mean something outside of the Windows/Office monopoly...and they're destroying the economics of the business in the process. Too bad there isn't an anti-dumping law for domestic companies.
MS only lets itself look completely inept like this to downplay the accusation of being a domineering monopoly.
If Verizon had hired some headz and gone MythTV, then we could be impressed.
Don't be fooled by the Rove-fu.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This is pretty significant tech news, given Microsoft's push for IPTV into the living room. Verizon can't get it to run on their hardware and is having to step in.
It's especially newsworthy in contrast to this week's Apple iTV announcement.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Microsoft is going at IPTV with the windows attitude: they are so infatuated with themselves that they think they will be the standard.
I had the chance of seeing a test deployment of MS's IPTV "solution" in a testing environment for evaluation and its basically sucks. The system is buggy, server intensive -- one of the engineers who demoed it to me refered to it as a 'Server Per Customer' solution. and in good MS tradition, cool features get dropped from version to version, as they are considered too buggy.
Visually speaking the "solution" isn't really great. Anyone who has a MediaCenter version of XP knows exactly how it looks and works, and skinning the menus, onscreen guide and services isnt possible.
i, for one, would never sign up to an IPTV service using the MS system. not because i hate them, but because i would not want a system that is far from being user-friendly. I would not recommend it to my worst ennemy.
No wonder Verizon is investing efforts to patch the thing: its a complete disaster. And verizon, in the good tradition of the Telco industry, cannot accept such a buggy and yet so costly system. If microsoft thought it could just walk into the IPTV business and dominate, they are wrong. At least this is a reassuring thing: money does not buy everything without effort, good will, and creativity.
once again, as for many other of its endeavors (the name Vista comes to mind) MS sets expectations that it cannot meet. When will people notice that, i keep wondering.
MS should throw less chairs accross offices and concentrate on what they do best...
oh wait... their speciality is buggy, coslty software with inexistant user friendlyness!
ant
Why in gods' names would this device need a full-fledged OS, much less one with as much crap attached as a Microsoft product?
How could the project designers not spec a more appropriate OS? There are literally *dozens* of alternatives that would make more sense.
Mind, it is Verizon. From all I've read, they typically can't find their arse with both hands and a copy of Grey's Anatomy.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Because the STB software is TERRIBLE. It makes my old buggy/blue screen a week WMC seem like a finely tuned machine. Its a good thing the picture quality is absolutely fantastic because that box is a MESS.
... because this is a world-class WTF.
So, what happened? Did Verizon just not tell Microsoft how much memory they were shipping with? Did they give MS the spec, then reduce the memory on the production units? Or maybe they pulled a NASA, and gave MS a memory capacity in HD marketing MB (where 1MB=1000*1000) and MS assumed it was in real-world MB (where 1MB=1024x1024).
Nathan
...Verizon is failing
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Having seen Verizon's internal mission critical apps that they have developed in-house, I can say this: The memory footprint will only increase. And the management will think that is good, because bigger is better. If for a minute they see a loss coming on the project, the will immediately suffle that off onto another business unit. They will then bestow upon themselves bonuses for cutting costs, most likely about %120 of the cost mitigated. Soon after, you will find a new charge on your bill.
You no longer have to be a M$ hater, to see them for what they are.
Only the ignorant or paid schill's could continue to ignore the track record of this bloated monopolist.
I laugh with every new revelation of M$'s craptastic products.
I think this is a BS story made up by Verizon to cover the fact that they will quietly disable features in IPTV when replacing it with their own software, just like they do in all of their phones.
Here in Washington the Microsoft Enhanced software running on the STB is utter garbage. Funny thing about it is that there recently was an update sent out to fix problems of sluggishness and unresponsiveness, and now I'm suffering from daily reboots. The sluggishness and unresponsiveness is still there.
I swear Comcast made a deal with TIVO, please for the love of all that is good switch to TIVO.
its worth it if the system doesn't run right ;-)
I fear the Y2038 bug
The bad thing, as history has proven, is that MS is probably going to gain from this by having access to the streamlined code that Verizon makes.
I'm wondering if that was an aspect of their deal that MS was counting on or, now just looking forward to?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!