iGuide

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

~ the last words ~

News Corporation spent 1995 trying to buy its way onto the internet in one move. MCI put about two billion dollars on the table for 13.5 percent of the company, and the two of them announced a joint venture that would carry Murdoch's content across MCI's wires. The vehicle was Delphi, the text-based online service News Corp had bought in 1993, and the plan was an online service large enough to be mentioned in the same sentence as America Online. That service was going to be called iGuide.

What arrived in March 1996 was a website. The ambition had collapsed into the web the way most 1995 ambitions did, and Delphi Internet Service Corp shipped iGuide as a portal rather than a walled service: TV listings from TV Guide, a movie database called CineBooks covering around thirty thousand titles, music, Fox Sports and Fox News, stock quotes, bulletin boards. The splash screen carried a red halftone logo and the line Making sense of the Net. Inside, the browser title called it The Internet Entertainment Guide and the logo graphic promised the Internet's ultimate guide to entertainment... and more.

It did not get a second year. News Corp pulled out of the online-service business over the winter of 1996, Delphi was cut loose, and in January 1997 the whole operation was relaunched as the TV Guide Entertainment Network. Everything that was not television got narrowed or dropped, the wire copy started coming from Reuters and Daily Variety, and iGuide stopped existing as a name. TVGEN would itself be renamed TV Guide Online in 2002, by which point the original venture had been dead for five years and nobody was counting.

~ the record ~

~ what was actually on it ~

The December 1996 homepage is worth reading because it is a complete inventory of what a large media company thought the web was for, eighteen months into the web being commercially interesting. The navigation ran in four blocks. Entertainment held TV Guide, movies, music and sports. Newsline held television news, movie news, music news and Fox News. The search block held listings and the movie database, with stock quotes filed alongside them. Communications held the bulletin boards.

Then there was the block called Hot Spots, which is the part that dates it hardest. Soap Dish, a daily soap opera episode digest. Games. A section called iSpy. And an X-Files feature labeled X-Test, running in the exact window when that show was the biggest thing on Fox. The whole page was wrapped in a JavaScript routine that opened a separate floating browser window, 104 pixels wide and 514 tall, unresizable and without scrollbars, pulling a navigation strip off a host named dingo.newscorp.com. The window had no scrollbars and could not be resized, so whatever it carried had to fit inside those 104 pixels.

~ the housekeeping ~

The splash page is a small time capsule of browser politics. It told visitors the site looks best when viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0, and linked them to Netscape's download page in case they needed it. Directly underneath, a badge reading AOL Members' Choice, and a separate line offering AOL users an update on AOL's new browser software. A News Corp property was recommending Netscape in one breath and courting an AOL audience it had just failed to compete with in the next. The machine serving all of it was a Netscape Commerce server, still answering requests from the same address two years later.

~ ten months ~

Ten months is a short life even by the standards of this graveyard, and the reason is that iGuide was never really the product. It was the consolation prize for a two-billion-dollar partnership that stopped making sense almost immediately, and once News Corp decided it did not want to be in the online business, the thing had no sponsor. What survived was the one asset that had an audience without any help from the internet, which was the TV listings, and the brand it survived under was the one printed on nineteen million copies a week.

By 12 December 1998 the domain was answering with a redirect to tvgen.com and nothing else. That redirect ran for years. iguide.com now serves a hundred and fourteen bytes of JavaScript that forwards to a parking page.

~ two years late ~

I came online in 1998, on a modem, in Turkey. Typing iguide.com the first week I had a connection got you bounced to tvgen.com without comment, and nothing on either end told you the address had meant something different ten months earlier. That is the ordinary condition of arriving late to a medium. The web you find is the one that survived the previous two years of corporate reversals, and it does not come with footnotes.

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