25 Years of PC Magazine: Year Fifteen 1996
07.11.07
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This computer-meets-television idea is hardly a new one. More than a decade before the debut of AppleTV—and a good six years before Windows Media Center—there was WebTV, the brainchild of a man named Steve Perlman. "I've been working to create an interactive television my entire life," he says. "I always knew it was a way of bringing computers to average people."
Perlman first combined computer and television as a high-school student living in New Hartford, Connecticut, when he decided his text-based home PC needed a graphics display. "This was before the Apple," he says, "so I hacked into a TV."
It's no surprise that he went on to build hardware for such companies as Apple and Atari, and by the early nineties, during a stint at the Apple spin-off General Magic, that boyhood idea resurfaced. Perlman's Magic TV project—which would have created an interactive television using the operating system General Magic had built for handheld devices—never came to fruition, but it soon led to a new project.
As the Internet went mainstream and he used Netscape Navigator for the first time, Perlman realized that the time was finally ripe for his interactive television. "I knew that the Net was a great way to bootstrap this idea I'd always had," he says. "I could finally bring computing to everyday people through their televisions. That was the genesis of WebTV."
The seminal set-top box debuted just before the 1996 Christmas season, allowing almost anyone to go online through a television. By the fall of 1997, over 150,000 people were using the product, and Perlman's company, WebTV Networks, was soon acquired by Microsoft for $503 million. And that was a steal. Over the next decade, WebTV—renamed MSN TV—would generate more than half a billion dollars in revenue.
Where's the technology today? Microsoft continues to add features and functionality to MSN TV. The company brought out version 2.0 in 2004, which worked with broadband modems and introduced on-screen messaging. Essentially a media adapter, the device now plays music, displays pictures, and browses the Internet. — next: The Browser Wars
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