AOL TV

» see aoltv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

AOL TV shipped in june 2000, five months after AOL announced it was buying Time Warner, at the moment when the company had more leverage than any consumer internet business had ever held. The hardware was a Philips set-top box that sat between your cable box and your television. The software underneath was middleware from Liberate Technologies, run by Mitchell Kertzman, which is the company that had been Network Computer Inc before it gave up on the network computer. There was a wireless keyboard, because there had to be.

The pitch was that AOL should follow you to the other screen. Email on the television, instant messaging on the television, chat, Shop AOL, and some interaction with the program you were watching. Carlos Silva, who ran the product studio in AOL's devices group, put it as being about watching television and creating new commerce opportunities, which tells you honestly enough where the revenue was supposed to come from. New members paid $21.95 a month. Existing AOL subscribers paid a small uplift on what they already paid.

It did not work, and the reason it did not work was known before it launched, because Microsoft had already spent four years learning it with WebTV. People do not sit forward at the television. The device sat in a room organized around a screen you look at from across the room, in a posture that has nothing to do with typing, and asked you to type. Wikipedia's summary of the response is ho-hum, which is generous. Sales ended in november 2002 and the documentation came off AOL's servers.

There is a specific kind of distance here that is worth naming: AOL never sold a subscription in turkey. No dial-up service and no monthly bill, so there was no local version of the premise, which depended entirely on already being an AOL subscriber and extending that subscription to another room. In 2000 I was sixteen and the internet lived on one machine in the house, reached through a modem, and the television was a completely separate object nobody expected anything from. AOL TV was selling the convenience of a service I could not have bought at any price.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

Read the 2000 coverage now and the strategy is coherent on paper. AOL had more than twenty million people paying it every month and the Time Warner deal was about to hand it cable infrastructure. The television was the screen Americans actually spent their evenings in front of. Putting the AOL account onto that screen looks less like a product idea than an inevitability, which is roughly how it was written up at the time.

What the paper version left out was that the value of AOL to its subscribers was almost entirely social and text-shaped. Instant messaging and chat rooms were the product. Both of those need a keyboard within reach and a screen close to your face, and a set-top box gives you neither. AOL was moving the right service onto the wrong hardware and charging extra for the trip.

~ the day it died ~

There was no announcement worth the name. Sales stopped in november 2002, the service ran on for existing subscribers for a while, and then the support pages disappeared. By then AOL Time Warner was in the middle of the worst corporate collapse of the era and a set-top box that never found an audience was not going to get a farewell.

The category it died in kept trying for another decade before someone got it right. What eventually put the internet on the television was not a keyboard and an account, it was an app you picked with a four button remote, plus a phone in your hand for everything that needed typing. AOL TV had the destination correct and got every single detail of the route wrong.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »