The MSN TV service from software giant Microsoft ( http://www.msntv.com/ ), which claims to be a leading provider of Internet service on television, has launched a new back-end technology platform designed to speed delivery of MSN TV content. The new platform allows pages in five MSN TV categories - the News, Sports, Money, Entertainment and Around Town information centers- to load up to 48 per cent faster than they did previously.

An official release informs that the re-engineered hosting environment replaces a legacy, proprietary HTML-based system with Microsoft ASP.NET technology and XML architecture.The company states that by using the latest Microsoft .NET technology that incorporates XML standards the content delivery environment has been rearchitected to improve user experience, increase productivity while reducing costs. By using the .NET architecture the engineers will be able to more easily integrate and use other Microsoft technologies in the future.

The new architecture for MSN TV utilises the rich output caching capabilities of ASP.NET. Through the caching technology, MSN TV executes a page request for a user of MSN TV and stores the results in memory. When another user requests the same page, ASP.NET serves the cached result from memory without re-executing the page. With the legacy architecture, identical automated requests for information such as weather, the latest news headlines, sports scores or stock quotes were executed repeatedly, slowing down the user experience and increasing operational costs.