from www.itvt.com

AT&T publicly admitted (after delay upon delay) that they are formally scaling back
deployments away from Motorola's DCT-5000 box featuring Microsoft's more advanced
middleware platform, and moving towards the lower-end box DCT-2000 featuring either
Liberate's low-end middleware or lower end software from Microsoft. [itvt] can
attest, however, that no in depth discussion was offered at the Silicon Valley schmooze-event
Microsoft held on Thursday afternoon where senior vice president, Jon DeVaan, announced
deals for their TV software: one in Mexico (high end) and one in Israel (low end)
and to ballyhoo their advanced middleware deployment in Portugal with TV Cabo. Extremely
bad news for Microsoft, which invested $5 billion in AT&T to secure its place in a cable
deployment for over 10 million boxes, and excellent news for Liberate (currently in a
trial with AT&T with lower end boxes), the truth of the situation comes as no surprise
given the fact that AT&T is in the midst of another breakup into 4 parts due to the weight
of recent mergers with companies such as MediaOne. Strangely enough, "WSJ" reminds,
Microsoft is rumored to be contributing $3 billion to a potential deal with News Corp.
to buy Hughes' DirecTV in order to secure a box network deployment if the deal goes
through.