MSN Direct

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

~ the obituary ~

msn direct was a us and canada only service, so it lived entirely inside a north american broadcast footprint. i was in ankara during its whole run, on ttnet broadband at home and gprs on my phone. the idea of a wristwatch that received weather from fm radio would have felt exotic reading about it in 2004. it was one of those microsoft ideas that made perfect sense in a memo and slightly less sense on your wrist.

the setup was clever. microsoft licensed the 67.65 khz subcarrier from commercial fm stations across major us cities. this is a sliver of bandwidth already used for things like reading services for the blind. through subcarrier tech called directband, developed with sca data systems, microsoft could push about 12 kilobits per second per tower. over a full day that added up to more than 100 megabytes of ambient data flowing into any device that had the right receiver.

the first devices were spot smartwatches from fossil and suunto in january 2004. they showed weather, stocks, news headlines, sports scores, horoscopes and short messages sent from a windows live account. by 2006 the service had a subscription model at roughly 60 dollars per year. by 2007 garmin's nuvi gps series was pulling traffic and gas prices over the same fm band, which turned out to be the most useful thing anyone actually did with directband.

~ the case file ~

~ the day it died ~

microsoft announced the shutdown in october 2009, giving customers just over two years of runway. the service was switched off on 1 january 2012. every spot watch and every msn direct capable garmin went silent, along with the small handful of internet-connected coffee makers and desktop clocks that had been pulling weather over the fm band. some of the hardware could keep working as a plain watch or plain gps. some of it was bricked.

~ what got buried with it ~

the deeper thing that died with msn direct was the idea that you could push a national data feed over broadcast radio and let cheap receivers pull whatever they needed. it was a pre-3g answer to the ambient-computing problem. wi-fi and cheap cellular data made the fm-subcarrier route pointless, but the idea keeps quietly resurfacing every time someone proposes a low-power always-on data layer for smart devices. the answer is now called low-power wan and it looks nothing like a wristwatch getting weather from your local country station.

~ the funny part ~

bill gates demoed spot watches at comdex 2002 wearing one himself. the pitch was a network of small objects that all quietly knew things. it was the smartwatch pitch a decade before smartwatches, running on a network layer nobody would keep supporting a decade later. everything about it was correct except the year.

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