Microsoft UltimateTV

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

~ the obituary ~

ultimatetv was carrier-locked to directv in the united states. that made it doubly foreign to a 17-year-old in ankara in 2001. we had digiturk satellite by then with no dvr layer at all. the directv-on-microsoft-dvr-with-the-webtv-internet stack was a recurring few paragraphs in the imported pc magazines i read.

microsoft announced ultimatetv with directv on october 26 2000 and launched the first hardware in march 2001. sony made the sat-w60 and rca made the dwd490re. both had dual satellite tuners so you could watch one channel while recording another, with up to 35 hours of storage. an internet browser built on the same webtv core lived inside the same box. the price was around $400 plus a monthly service fee on top of the directv plan.

tivo had already shipped in 1999 and had the dvr cultural moment locked up. tivo's box was cheaper and the user experience was better, while microsoft's hardware partners were also fighting unit-cost battles. then the directv-echostar acquisition got announced in october 2001 and microsoft watched its primary distribution partner enter an 11-month regulatory limbo. when the fcc blocked the merger in october 2002, the partnership was already over.

microsoft cut the ultimatetv division on january 22 2002, eliminating 168 jobs from the mountain view office. directv took over service and kept the existing boxes running for subscribers who had already bought in. the last software update arrived in the summer of 2007, after which the program guide was no longer being maintained. the boxes turned into expensive paperweights one channel-lineup change at a time.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

ultimatetv was supposed to be the moment microsoft got into the living room. webtv had been the proof of concept and the partnership with directv was the distribution layer. the dual-tuner spec was meant to be the differentiator. the bet was that a satellite dvr with internet would beat a cable dvr without. that bet ran into reality fast. tivo already had the brand and directv had its own dvr ambitions. the windows-shop pitch did not translate cleanly to a set-top product.

~ the slide ~

the first set of complaints from owners was about the user interface. it was slow and the menus took several seconds to draw. reliability was the other recurring problem. drives failed and software updates sometimes bricked the box. the service team was a directv call center that could not really troubleshoot a microsoft os.

~ the long tail ~

the existing fleet kept working for years after the brand died. directv quietly tuned the program guide to keep them alive. owners who paid for the box and the monthly service felt they had been promised something durable and the company at least pretended to keep the promise. the last update in summer 2007 was the bookmark. after that the box ran on whatever it already knew. by 2010 most of them were unplugged, replaced by directv's own hd dvrs.

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