Ericsson wraps its acquisition of Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV platform

Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERIC) has put the final touches on its acquisition of Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV platform, making it a top middleware supplier with a 25 percent share of IPTV deployments.

Already, Mediaroom-based TV services are offered by over 60 service providers such as AT&T (NYSE: T) and Telus (NYSE: TU). Overall, Mediaroom serves nearly 13 million households and 24 million set-top boxes.

Ben Huang, global marketing director at Mediaroom, told FierceTelecom in an interview that being part of Ericsson will enable it to create a stronger bond with consumers through a complementary set of network and media products.  

"At a high level, the nice thing around Mediaroom is because we work deeply with operators in taking this kind of service offering to market--we call it a B2B2C model--very much with a heavy focus on what the "C" is, that consumer set of experiences, but knowing that we partner deeply with operators to take that to market. And that's very much aligned with Ericsson's model of how they work," Huang said.  "They work closely with operators; they have a deep, deep history with operators around the world. For us, when we think about the progress that we've made with IPTV in the pay TV platform space, it aligns very well from both a product perspective as well as a business model, go-to-market perspective, with how Ericsson structures their businesses. And that's why we think that alignment is going to create a lot of synergy, and at the same time the broader portfolio that Ericsson has around networks, and other aspects of media, we think that will be very accretive once Mediaroom is incorporated into that portfolio. "

With the deal complete, the vendor will be able to market its expanded IPTV product portfolio to existing telco customers such as AT&T U-verse and over-the-top providers like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN).

As previously reported, Ericsson's Mediaroom unit, including its 400 employees, will be integrated into Ericsson's Support Solutions unit.

Ericsson's timing to make a bigger splash in the IPTV space couldn't be better.

According to Digital TV Research's "Global IPTV Forecasts," worldwide IPTV subscribers will grow from 13 million in 2008 to 69 million in 2012 to 167 million in 2018.

For more:
- see the release

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