At NAB2007 Microsoft announced additional top technology suppliers providing technologies that support the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition software platform, which is being deployed by several leading service providers worldwide. The announcement illustrates the accelerating growth of the IPTV industry and Microsoft's commitment to work with a broad range of solutions providers to ensure ongoing industry innovation while allowing service providers the flexibility to choose from a variety of technologies to deploy IPTV services.

The announcement features new Microsoft IPTV partners or solutions in the following categories:

• Server processors. AMD and Intel Corporation provide leading chipset solutions for server and storage infrastructures for the IPTV Edition ecosystem. Their processors are key to the scalable deployment of live and on-demand TV applications.
• Encoding solutions. Grass Valley standard definition encoders from Thomson support the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard used in IPTV Edition.
• Set-top boxes. Pirelli Broadband Solutions will provide set-top boxes supporting Microsoft TV IPTV Edition. Pirelli's portfolio of hybrid decoders brings together IPTV and digital terrestrial TV in one multimedia platform, enabling a wide range of content bundles to be secured through conditional access system standards and digital rights management technologies. Pirelli's set-top boxes are based on single-chip technology and support legacy and new encoding standards such as H.264 and VC-1 at both standard and high definition. Pirelli set-top boxes can be equipped with hard drives of various storage capacities, providing additional capabilities such as local video recording, recorded-services playback, live TV pause, and time-shift recording.
• Servers and storage. Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sun Fire x64 servers are the newest carrier-class servers to have been tested against the high- performance IPTV platforms from Microsoft.

This host of new IPTV ecosystem partners joins a broad group of leading hardware and software providers already working with Microsoft TV to make IPTV a reality. These include systems integrator and infrastructure provider Alcatel-Lucent; set-top box manufacturers Cisco Systems, Motorola, Philips and Tatung; chip manufacturers Sigma Design and STMicroelectronics; server solution providers HP and IBM; and encoder providers Cisco Systems, Harmonic, Motorola and TANDBERG Television.

Microsoft TV IPTV Edition continues to improve its standing in the industry with deployments under way with nine leading service providers and trials with seven additional providers, representing a footprint across 15 countries on four continents. The IPTV Edition platform will be demonstrated at Microsoft's booth at NAB2007 (South Hall 1, Stand SL3213, Las Vegas Convention Center).