— An introductory line spoken during a media roadshow-style event ahead of the launch of WebTV, on July 10, 1996. Roughly a year earlier, Steve Perlman and two other co-founders launched the company. During the presentation, Perlman, a onetime Apple employee who invented the firm's Quicktime technology that is still in heavy use today, called the WebTV reveal historic. "We've repackaged the internet to be designed for this type of medium," he said."We won't tell you that TV will never be the same, because it will. It's you who will be different. Just watch."
How hard was it to sell television-optimized internet to the public?
Five interesting facts about WebTV
Thomas Dolby, he of "She Blinded Me With Science" early-MTV fame, was involved in creating the notable blips for the WebTV through his company, Headspace. Dolby's company at the time was pushing forth an early music-streaming technology called RMF, meant to be complementary to MIDI and MP3 formats. WebTV was one of the few devices that supported it natively.
For a brief period of time, WebTV's encryption was considered so tough that the US government classified it as munitions, preventing the device from being released in Europe and other countries because it was considered a weapon of sorts. The laws eventually were changed, because (as anyone could figure out by using it) WebTV was not a weapon.
WebTV, as it turned out, had at least one virus. In 2002, a man named David Jeansonne emailed WebTV users a malicious program that claimed to allow users to change the on-screen colors, but in reality actually changed the device's dial number to 911. Just 10 people were affected, but Jeansonne received prison time for the malicious action.
Like the Prevue Channel, WebTV did have a community focused on hacking the device. Among the sneakier users of the platform was Matt Squadere, who has periodically been updating a site called HackTV since 1998. The site features info about secret areas on the platform and hacks to get games to work on a WebTV device. His actions actually got him banned from the service back in 1999.
WebTV was not designed for video games, but at least one video game console supported WebTV. While owned by Microsoft at the time, the WebTV team helped get a Japanese version of the service on the Sega Dreamcast.
Why Microsoft mostly left WebTV (also known as MSN TV) alone for 16 years
Don't shed any tears for WebTV. In a lot of ways, it's still with us.(Also: Don't shed any tears for Steve Perlman. He's a serial entrepreneur who developed the also-defunct cloud-gaming service OnLive and an impressive-sounding cellular technology called pCell. He's also at the center of a legal battle around some face-scanning technology that has been used in some of your favorite big-budget action movies. The latter issue is a headache, but he's doing OK, even if WebTV didn't turn him into Steve Jobs 2.0.)Ultimately, Microsoft found a better vessel for the WebTV idea in its Xbox console. While web browsing was not a prominent part of the Xbox or the Xbox 360 (though Internet Explorer was eventually installed on the 360), the Xbox One has stellar web-browsing capabilities that actually sort of make sense on a 60-inch screen.Part of the reason for this is that a number of members of the Xbox team were alums of the WebTV service, and their fingerprints were all over the 360 in particular. (It helped that those WebTV alums were also involved in another noble experiment in interactive set-top boxes, the 3DO.)But a bigger shift may be in the television itself. While fast internet streams are more common today, it's important to note that nearly every TV sold in stores these days has a resolution that's generally good enough to work as a computer monitor in a pinch. Sometimes, the screens are even better than HD.But ultimately, people don't primarily use the Xbox One to surf the web and check their email, and they don't really use the Apple TV or Roku for those reasons, either. These devices are built for apps—big apps focused on games, small apps focused on video, but, no matter how you shake it, apps. And apps fully optimized for the interface, ultimately, were what the public really wanted from their TV-based online experiences.The web is nice, but we prefer it within a foot or so of our faces.