Microsoft Mediaroom is an update introduced to the company's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) software platform back in mid June. NXTcomm was the stage where Microsoft upped the stakes for its IPTV platform introducing media sharing and enhanced MultiView capabilities as well as extended support for digital terrestrial television (DTT) and a variety of offerings from video-on-demand to interactive TV-based services, via the Multimedia Application Environment. All went quiet on the IPTV front following the June rebranding of the platform as Mediaroom, but Microsoft is now ready to move into the next stage with an initiative designed to catalyze further growth and adoption.

In this context, the Redmond company announced the availability of the Interoperability and Qualification Lab, focused on accelerating Microsoft Mediaroom deployments. The program was unveiled at IBC2007 and is addressed at digital encoders interested in delivering content via Microsoft's IPTV platform.

"As worldwide deployments of Microsoft Mediaroom accelerate, we plan to offer our service provider customers the strongest set of encoding solutions to choose from, while enabling our encoding partners to succeed," said Joe Seidel, director of global partner development for the Microsoft TV business at Microsoft. "The investment and commitment on our part and by our encoding partners is an indication of the strength of our global IPTV ecosystem."

Essentially the IQ Lab is designed to act as a standard of compliance for encoding vendors. The Redmond company revealed that all participants in the IQ Lab will benefit not only from the association between the Mediaroom multimedia and IPTV software platform and their encoders, with a high level of interoperability and compliance, but will also become Mediaroom ecosystem partners.

The IQ Lab will provide three services to encoding vendors. It will first of all deal with support and training issues, allowing "access to Microsoft IPTV training sessions and a dedicated team of Microsoft engineers and program managers to evaluate whether encoding specifications are met," the company stated. Microsoft also promised to allow access to test reporting and the resources it has available for analysis of the results, as well as to the test kits themselves together with "Mediaroom software and AV consulting expertise to encoding solutions to support future versions of the software platform." Microsoft added.