Jump to content

MSN TV

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Superzerocool (talk | contribs) at 06:27, 13 November 2005 (Interwiki: Add es). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

MSN TV (formerly WebTV) is an Internet appliance developed by the Microsoft TV subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. The appliance attaches to a television and provides proprietary dial-up Internet access.

WebTV Networks was founded by three veterans of Apple Computer and General Magic, Steve Perlman, Bruce Leak and Phil Goldman, in the summer of 1995. The company was originally named Artemis to disguise the nature of their business. Early versions of the device were built with ease-of-use and low cost as their primary design considerations, and were aimed at bringing the Internet to senior citizens and those without an Internet connection or personal computer. WebTV Networks was purchased by Microsoft for $425 million dollars USD in April 1997, before the company was even two years old.

The first WebTV device featured a proprietary operating system, filesystem, and a webbrowser based on the Spyglass Mosaic web browser in just two megabytes of flash memory. No hard drives were present in these WebTV Classic boxes. The software was comprised of a TCP/IP stack, HTML rendering engine, JavaScript interpreter, audio engine (MP3, MIDI, Realaudio, and WAV), and video engine (Flash and MPEG). Video rendering for the television was done by the proprietary "Solo" chip so the low-end MIPS CPU could be freed up to process web pages. WebTV "Classic" units originally had 112 MHz chips with the "Plus" units having 167 MHz chips.

Together with the monthly $24.95 service fee, the $200 box was affordable and well positioned to close the digital divide many technology pundits saw developing in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, the confluence of conflicting marketing messages, lack of educated consumers, and problems with the software, hardware, and dialup network plagued the rapid acceptance of the product. Even after dropping the price and rebranding the service, MSN TV subscriptions peaked at around 1 million in the early 2000s, even with the introduction of several new versions of the hardware, including the UltimateTV digital video recorder and a lower-cost version of the original WebTV Internet applicance. Coupled with the advent of affordable broadband Internet access, the set-top Internet appliance's days were numbered.

Microsoft turned to cable operators and satellite providers with their technology and struck deals to integrate it into the cable and satellite boxes released to their television subscribers, and now seeks to expand into the living room via the Xbox and Windows Media Center products.

The latest incarnation of MSN TV is "MSN TV 2 Media & Internet Player". It adds some wireless media hub functionality, where, by connecting an external wireless (or wired) network interface, you can browse home PCs and play photos, music and videos from those PCs on your TV. Also, the new device enables you to connect USB printers to print photos on them, and you don't have to get connectivity from Microsoft any more; you can connect using your existing broadband service. However, you still have to subscribe to MSN TV service, which costs $9.95 / month or $99.95 per year. The Xbox 360 will have the MSN TV chip.

Retrieved from "http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=MSN_TV&oldid=28185396"