WebTV / MSN TV

» see webtv.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

webtv launched on 18 september 1996. it was a small grey set-top box that plugged into a phone jack on one end and into a tv's video input on the other. the box dialed an isp, fetched web pages, reformatted them through a proxy server to fit a tv screen at low resolution, and displayed them on the television. you typed using a wireless keyboard that sat on the coffee table. it was the internet for households that did not own a personal computer.

microsoft bought webtv networks in april 1997 for 425 million dollars. the founders had built it in palo alto with backing from sony and philips. microsoft kept the brand for four years, then rebranded the service msn tv in july 2001 to absorb it into the larger msn portal strategy. the box hardware was made by sony, philips, rca, and later by microsoft itself. peak subscriber count was around 1.1 million in the early 2000s.

the service slowly bled subscribers as broadband and home pcs got cheaper through the 2000s. by 2010 the user base was largely older americans who had bought the box years earlier and never moved on to a real computer. on 1 july 2013 microsoft sent the shutdown email. the service ended on 30 september 2013. customer service stayed open until 15 january 2014 to help users export anything they wanted to keep.

i never used webtv. it was a US-only product on US phone numbers and US isp infrastructure. it was also not for me; it was specifically for the household segment that wanted the internet without the computer. by 1996 i was already at home with a 33.6k modem on a real pc in turkey, on superonline, getting on the web through a desktop browser. webtv was the alternative path that turkey did not get and that i would not have wanted.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the box was a thin stamped-metal slab. it had a phone jack and a tv-out and a power port. you connected the phone line to dial-up, you connected the tv-out to your television's composite or s-video input, you powered it on. it booted to a custom os based on a microkernel that microsoft would later inherit. you logged into a webtv account, got an email address ending in webtv.net or later msn.com, and saw a homepage menu.

the browser was the engineering trick. tv screens at the time were 480i NTSC. that gave you about 320 pixels of usable horizontal resolution after the overscan was accounted for. webtv's proxy servers fetched web pages, then reformatted them to be readable at that resolution: bigger text, narrower columns, anti-aliased fonts, fewer images. for content authors, your site might look completely different on webtv than on a desktop browser. the user-agent string was distinctive. some sites detected it and served special low-resolution versions.

~ the household segment ~

webtv's marketing was clear about who it was for. the ads showed older couples in living rooms emailing their grandchildren. the price was lower than buying a windows pc. the learning curve was lower because you used a remote and a keyboard rather than a mouse and a desktop os. for a specific segment of the late-90s US public, webtv was the exact right answer.

that was also why it had a ceiling. webtv was specifically the choice you made when you did not want a real computer. anyone who got a windows pc later would never come back. that meant the user base was constantly being eroded from the bottom by people moving up to a full computer, while not being replenished from the top because everyone who wanted a real computer just bought one.

~ how it died ~

microsoft kept msn tv alive for an unusually long time given how little growth it saw. the service was profitable in a small way and microsoft did not want the publicity hit of cutting off a million older customers. they ran it through the 2000s as a low-priority back-burner product. msn tv 2 launched in 2004 with better hardware. nothing replaced the user base.

by 2013 microsoft had bigger fish to fry. windows 8 was struggling. the surface tablet was new and the xbox one was weeks away from shipping. msn tv was a product from the previous millennium with a shrinking footprint of users. on 1 july 2013 microsoft emailed customers that the service would end on 30 september 2013. that was 92 days of notice. the actual hardware kept booting after that day but could not connect to anything.

~ what remains ~

the proof that "the internet on your tv" was not the right shape. people did not want the web on the living-room screen. they wanted the web on a desk in front of them, then later on a phone in their hand. the smart-tv era of 2010s did the same thing again with no more success. webtv was the first attempt and the most committed one. it failed for the same reason all the later attempts failed: the tv is a passive viewing surface, not a typing surface.

the long quiet shutdown. webtv took 17 years to fully die. microsoft did not promote it after 2005. nobody talked about it. when the shutdown finally happened in september 2013 the press coverage was minor and treated it as a footnote. the service had been gone in cultural relevance for a decade before the servers actually went off. that is a model for how a lot of microsoft properties die: not killed loudly, just allowed to thin out until nobody notices the day they unplug it.

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