Kaiyzen Group

Bit of a delay on this one.., still nursing my CES hangover and haven’t been writing too much.

I covered some MS stuff while at the show and posted a write up over at GigaOm’s NewTeeVee site.

The title is a bit dramatic after going through one of their editors, but basically Microsoft is really kind of silently mounting a solid standing in the living room by battling on two fronts, one direct to consumers with Xbox, the other via the service providers and Mediaroom.

I am very interested to see how the whole telecom space plays out over the next 3-5 years.

The battle brews over tv/voice/internet as Comcast rolls out their phone service everywhere (just got the service recently in my area, not to bad so far), AT&T pushing their U-Verse setup, and of course Verizon with their FiOS move and starting to office television service as well.

The U-Verse setup is getting some serious marketing muscle of late.  Not more that two/three days go by where I dont see a commercial/ad, or some flyer that is mailed to the house.  The offering seems pretty sweet especially with the ability to choose your own channel package.  This type of offering is exactly what competition is ALL about.  Long have consumers wanted to pick and choose their channels w/o getting a bunch o crap they could care less about.

AT&T still has a way to go to boost their internet speeds in order to really start to appeal to the high end crowd that will happily drop $200/$250 month to continue optimal consumption of data/voice services.

I wish Verizon would get their arses out west with their FiOS setup.

VentureBeat has a great writeup about Verizon asking the FCC for permission to be able to cancel peoples cable service on their behalf when signing up new customers.  This will be a great move that will help add more fuel to the fire.

Then you have Sprint-Nextel floundering, especially after their $30+ billion writedown.  Maybe they should team up with Motorola.., they would make a hello of a duo.