![]() ![]() The company operated out of half of a former BMW car dealership building on Alma Street in Palo Alto, California, which was being used for storage by the Museum of American Heritage. Perlman brought along co-founders Bruce Leak and Phil Goldman shortly after conceiving the basic concept. ![]() It occurred to him that if the television audience was enabled by a device to augment television viewing with receiving information or commercial offers through the television, then perhaps the web address could act as a signal and the television cable could be the conduit.Ī Silicon Valley startup, WebTV Networks was founded in July 1995. He thought that the people who might be interested in what the site had to offer were not using the web. One night, Perlman was browsing the web and came across a Campbell's soup website with recipes. While working at General Magic, the idea of bringing TVs and computers together resurfaced. He went on to build software for companies such as Apple and Atari. He first combined computer and television as a high-school student when he decided his home PC needed a graphics display. I always knew it was a way of bringing computers to average people.Ĭo-founder Steve Perlman is credited with the idea for the device. I've been working to create an interactive television my entire life. For the MSN TV 2, however, a completely new service based on IIS servers and regular HTTP/HTTPS services was used. ![]() The original WebTV network relied on a Solaris backend network and telephone lines to deliver service to customers via dial-up, with "frontend servers" that talk directly to boxes using a custom protocol, the WebTV Protocol (WTVP), to authenticate users and deliver content to boxes. ![]() The WebTV/MSN TV service lasted for 18 years, shutting down on September 30, 2013, and allowing subscribers to migrate their data well before that date arrived. The setup included a thin client in the form of a set-top box, a remote, a network connection using dial-up, or with the introduction of Rogers Interactive TV and the MSN TV 2, the option to use broadband, and a wireless keyboard, which was sold optionally up until the 2000s. The WebTV/MSN TV service, however, also offered its own exclusive services such as a "walled garden" newsgroup service, news and weather reports, storage for user bookmarks (Favorites), IRC (and for a time, MSN Chat) chatrooms, a Page Builder service that let WebTV users create and host webpages that could later be shared to others via a link if desired, the ability to play background music from a predefined list of songs while surfing the web, dedicated sections for aggregated content covering various topics (entertainment, romance, stocks, etc.), and a few years after Microsoft bought out WebTV, integration with MSN Messenger and Hotmail. The WebTV and MSN TV devices allowed a television set to be connected to the Internet, mainly for web browsing and e-mail. While most thin clients developed in the mid-1990s were positioned as diskless workstations for corporate intranets, WebTV was positioned as a consumer product, primarily targeting those looking for a low-cost alternative to a computer for Internet access. In April 1997, the company was purchased by Microsoft Corporation and in July 2001, was rebranded to MSN TV and absorbed into MSN. The WebTV product was announced in July 1996 and later released on September 18, 1996. The device design and service was developed by WebTV Networks, Inc., a company started in 1995. MSN TV (formerly WebTV) was a web access product consisting of a thin client device that used a television for display (instead of using a computer monitor), and the online service that supported it. ![]()
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