AT CES last year, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees to expect the integration of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Xbox Live with its Microsoft IPTV platform to come to the market by Christmas 2007. With December right around the corner, eager Xbox fans have yet to see the online social community move into their living rooms.

Many Xbox followers expected IPTV functionality to be at the top of the list of Xbox 360 fall updates back in late October, based largely on screenshots showing the capability on a serviced Xbox 360 console. Microsoft responded to the speculation saying that the features were inadvertently exposed and while it wouldn’t be part of the fall update, the service was coming.

Jim Brady, spokesman for Microsoft Mediaroom, Microsoft’s IPTV division, said the integrated service is still on track to being released by the end of the year. The integrated Xbox/IPTV set-top, along with other Mediaroom functions, will be made available to its 16 current service provider customers before next year’s CES, and the decision as to when to roll out the IPTV-integrated service is then up to them.

“We are pretty much on the original time line we set for it,” Brady said. “We are in discussions with a lot of our top service provider customers, and there has been a lot of interest. The platform will be ready for them to deploy at their discretion by the end of the year. We think there should be really good momentum for this platform in 2008.”

It has been Microsoft Mediaroom’s intention to allow service providers to dictate the deployment date from the beginning, Brady said. “When we announced this at CES, there was some confusion,” he added. “Some reporters thought it was a service that Microsoft would offer, but it’s fully dependent on the service provider. That is how Microsoft media room is delivered.”

Microsoft Mediaroom is currently in discussions with a number of its customers about offering the service, Brady said, but no deployments have yet to be announced. AT&T, Microsoft Mediaroom’s biggest customer, declined to comment on its intentions to integrate its U-Verse IPTV into the Xbox 360.

Xbox 360 is an online social community that uses Xbox consoles in multi-player games operating over the global Internet. Through the integration of add-ons such as presence and voice-over-IP, players can interact as they play. When it is released, the integration of Xbox Live and IPTV would bring all of this functionality together, including social networking through chatting with other users and the ability to view live TV or switch from TV to gaming without interruption. So, while gaming fanatics might not see XBOX 360 Live for IPTV under their trees this year, they can cross their fingers that they’ll be ringing in the new year with it instead.