This November I gave a keynote address at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco. Later I chatted with Andy Plesser, founder and CEO of Beet.tv, about Microsoft’s IPTV efforts and opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Some highlights from my talk with Andy:

The biggest area where we've placed a big bet, and we've been at it for a while, is in our IPTV area, our Media Room technology, and we've been partnering with over 20 major service providers around the world. AT&T being the U.S. primary partner, and the AT&T Uverse service that's out there. It's a platform that is encouraging partnership and third-party content creation, so switch network that's very high performance, allowing for multiple picture-in-picture, instant channel changing, all kinds of interesting capabilities. So, that to us is one of the most interesting areas.

Clearly, online Internet-based video distribution through various mechanisms is going to be important, is important. The business models are taking shape. Obviously advertising driven is one, but there will be subscription models, there will be pay-per-view style models, one-off purchases as well.

We've delivered some interesting tools in this area, our Silverlight technology and Silverlight streaming service, which lets people host for free 4 gigabytes and have 100,000 downloads a month at no charge.

Our Windows 2008 Server coming out early next calendar year includes the media streaming capability and media server capability at no charge, integrated into the Windows Server platform, which runs at scale.

I could keep going. We have just a plethora of interesting underlying platform assets and partner opportunity. I think it's one of the most exciting times ever. I think we have the foundation technologies and the underlying platforms that have matured, and in our case, in Microsoft's case, we're bringing a lot of those underlying platforms and tools to market now.

I don't see it as a bubble in any particular way. Personally, there's always excess investment, and there's always failure, but I think that the level of opportunity and the level of outcome, if you will, of the buyers, the acquirers, which is typically where startups end up−a few of them go public but most of them are acquired, the successful ones−I think it's going to be a great opportunity for the entrepreneurs.

More on our IPTV Business:

Business Week Nov. 6, 2007, by Peter Burrows: Microsoft IPTV: At Long Last, Progress

NewTeeVee blog of my talk, Nov. 14, 2007

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