Windows Live for TV

» see get.live.com/betas/TV_betas as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Microsoft spent the middle of the 2000s convinced that the personal computer was about to move into the living room and start behaving like an appliance. Windows Media Center was the interface for that bet, and Windows Live for TV was the attempt to carry the social half of Windows Live across to it. You would sit on a sofa, pick up a remote, and read your friends' Spaces on the television. The beta appeared on 3 January 2007, and Gizmodo wrote it up the next day as "still beta and thus, still flakey", finishing with the observation that there was little practical use for any of it.

It was built on Windows Presentation Foundation and .NET Framework 3.0, which let it run either inside Media Center or straight in Internet Explorer 7 as a browser-hosted application. The look was Windows Live Wave 1 taken literally: glossy panels along the top and bottom, with the bright lines of energy that design language used to fake depth running behind a carousel you spun through in 3D. The requirements were Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, which in 2007 was a real filter. A Media Center PC wired to a television was never a configuration anyone had in Turkey, where MSN lived on the desktop with a webcam clipped to the top of the monitor.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the beta promised ~

The published feature list for the beta program was ambitious in the way an unfinished product is allowed to be. You would browse Windows Live Spaces in 3D, with Gallery views and full keyword search over them. You would hold text and voice conversations through Windows Live Messenger from the sofa. Windows Live Call would let you ring a friend's mobile or landline at the cheap rates Microsoft was then advertising, and PC-to-PC calls to other Messenger users would be free. The whole thing was supposed to be drivable with a Media Center remote, provided you had the infrared adapter.

The remote was the real argument. Everything else on that list already existed on the machine four feet away. The claim being made was that a ten-foot interface and a handset would turn instant messaging into something a household did together in a room, rather than something one person did alone with a keyboard.

~ the one thing that worked ~

Only the Spaces half ever became usable. Messenger conversations never arrived in the shipping beta, and neither did any of the calling features, which means the product in its final state was a television-shaped reader for a blogging service. Microsoft also managed to build it on a foundation it was already walking away from: the browser-hosted WPF approach it used was deprecated in the Windows Media Center SDK by version 5.3.

~ the day it died ~

A program manager said publicly that development had ceased, and the service was shut down on 24 June 2008. An MVP blog post headed "Windows Live for TV Officially Dies" is dated 23 May, a month before the switch-off, so people inside the orbit of the product knew it was finished well before the plug came out.

The detail that sticks is where the team's own blog lived. It was at wlfortv.spaces.live.com, which is to say it was a Windows Live Space, hosted on the exact service the application existed to display. It had gone a full year without a post by the time the project was declared over. Spaces itself closed in 2011 and pushed its users over to WordPress.com, which took the farewell notice down along with everything it had been written about.

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