Microsoft Mediaroom

» see microsoft.com/mediaroom as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Microsoft Mediaroom shipped in July 2007 as the IPTV middleware Microsoft sold to telcos who wanted to be in the television business. AT&T U-verse ran on it. So did Deutsche Telekom Entertain, Telus Optik, Bell Fibe, Telefonica, Swisscom, Singtel, Portugal Telecom. By 2013 the platform sat under 22 million set-top boxes across more than thirty million devices in 65 commercial deployments across 34 countries. It was, briefly, the leading IPTV stack on the planet.

The lineage went back further than the brand. Microsoft TV started in October 2000 as the platform under UltimateTV, the DirecTV-WebTV DVR experiment that died inside three years. After UltimateTV failed, the same group quietly pivoted to selling the middleware to phone companies who wanted a TV product to bundle with their broadband. That product, eventually rebranded Mediaroom, is the one that worked.

It worked too well in the wrong direction. By 2013 Microsoft had Xbox, which it wanted to be the television device. Mediaroom was a competing internal story, profitable but boring, owned by carriers Microsoft did not want to keep negotiating with. So on 8 April 2013 Microsoft announced the sale to Ericsson. The deal closed 5 September 2013, and Mediaroom became Ericsson Mediaroom, then MediaKind after Ericsson spun the media group out in 2018.

mediaroom never had a turkish edition. turk telekom's tivibu, ttnet's webtv, digiturk's d-smart, none of them ran on this stack. it was the layer of microsoft you only met if your phone company sold you tv, and the phone company i lived under sold ttnet adsl and that was the deal.

~ the dossier ~

~ what mediaroom actually was ~

It was server software plus a set-top box reference design. The carrier would run the head-end gear in their data center, push live channels and VOD and time-shift recordings down their own IP network, and the customer got a black box under the TV that looked like a cable box but was actually a thin client talking to a microsoft server. The DVR was network-side. The interactive features (program guide, search, parental controls) were rendered on the box but sourced from the server.

This was the model AT&T U-verse used to undercut comcast on the cable bundle. Same channels, similar VOD, but a different physical pipe and a microsoft-shaped software layer in the middle. It was not a consumer product. You did not download it. You signed up for U-verse and they sent a technician with the box.

~ how it sold ~

The sale to Ericsson was about focus, not failure. Microsoft was profitable on Mediaroom and had real customers. But Xbox 360 had crossed 77 million units by 2013 and Xbox One was about to ship, and the company's internal TV strategy was now "Xbox is the device under your TV". Selling Mediaroom let Ericsson have the carrier business and freed the redmond TV org to fight one war instead of two.

Ericsson paid an undisclosed amount and immediately became the leading IPTV middleware vendor with over 25 percent market share. Carriers kept paying their license fees to a new owner. The Microsoft Mediaroom logo on the boot screen got replaced over the next two years of firmware updates.

~ the long tail at ericsson ~

Ericsson rebranded the platform Ericsson Mediaroom, then folded it into a broader Ericsson Media Solutions division. In July 2018 Ericsson spun the media group out as MediaKind, a separate company majority-owned by One Equity Partners. The product still exists under the MediaKind brand in 2026, with diminishing relevance as IPTV becomes a smaller story than streaming and carrier TV bundles shrink.

What got buried was the microsoft brand on it. The technology kept shipping. The microsoft-was-also-in-the-iptv-middleware-game story stopped being told in 2013, and is now the kind of thing you only learn from old press releases.

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