Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
July 9, 2013 06:00 pm -04

An inside view of the WebTV revolution that didn't happen

An inside view of the WebTV revolution that didn't happen

You might think it should have happened sooner. This week, Microsoft announced it would decommission its MSN TV (formerly WebTV) service. Even I didn't think it would last this long, and I was WebTV's greatest advocate back in the day. In fact, I was its official evangelist, hired by founder Steve Perlman and his company's PR agency as WebTV's national media spokesperson for a period leading up to and including the product launch.

In 1996, WebTV was tech's hottest startup, considered a blazing harbinger of the future, all for pretty good reasons. WebTV was primarily an internet popularization play during an era of widespread uncertainty about computers in the home and the value of being online. If tablets and smartphones represent a Steve Jobs-ordained post-PC era, WebTV can be seen in retrospect as a pre-PC computing category. In my view, it isn't modern web-connected TVs that finally killed WebTV (MSN TV) -- it's the mobile revolution that did it.

Filed under: , ,

Comments


Original Link: http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/09/an-inside-view-of-the-webtv-revolution-that-didnt-happen/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Enga

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Engadget

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics. Engadget was launched in March of 2004 in partnership with the Weblogs, Inc. Network (WI

More About this Source Visit Engadget