Summary
Virtualization is fruitful only if improves the economics while keeping the content delivery network performance intact. Also the regulatory and disaster recovery aspects have to be addressed when rolling out in rest of the world.
Analysis
Virtualization will reduce the hardware, software and hosting expense by rationalizing it but unicast content especially high demand one, is best served by local hosting. I am sure Microsoft is taking care of unicast content delivery performance. Also the regulations varies across the world and many companies would like to host software and content locally (especially broadcast channel and content containing local news) thus reducing the real benefit of virtualization on the global scale. For software virtualization, the company has to play due attention to redundancy and disaster recovery (100% availability). Since like telephone services, consumers now demand 100% availability of broadcast TV channels. Also the security aspects (virus etc.) as well as content censure-ship have to be addressed at local level and Microsoft must have or should make provision for it. I my view Microsoft has to tackle both end of the market…telecom companies as well as cable companies to may hay while the sun shines.
