Today in 1997, Microsoft released an improved version of WebTV after purchasing the startup earlier in the year for $425 million.
Founded in July 1995, WebTV was announced on July 10, 1996, generating a large wave of press attention as not only the first television-based use of the World Wide Web, but also as the first consumer-electronics device to access the World Wide Web without a personal computer.
The question of what is the best way to provide access to the Web from home dominated the product and business strategies of computer, consumer electronics and entertainment companies in the early 1990s: PC or TV? “Last mile” connection through cable or phone companies?
Despite being heavily hyped, WebTV struggled to gain traction during its early years. The technology itself, first conceptualized by a startup of the same name and distributed by tech giants Sony and Philips, was impressive and forward-thinking at the time, taking advantage of a budding mainstream interest in the web....
But the web was simply not designed for reading 10 feet away from the screen, despite changes made by Perlman and other developers that specifically focused on television readability. [Note: The web was text-based in those days.] They made the text bigger, worked hard on the typography, and made it easy to scroll through links with a remote control. But it was still a slog…
In 2013, 16 years after acquiring WebTV, Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN TV, the service formerly known as WebTV, citing the rapidly evolving internet as a contributing factor to the service's demise.
As it turned out, the most popular way to access the web—starting in 2007—has been the smart mobile phone, not a PC or a TV.