The WebTV Experience - Exploring a BRAND NEW Unit!

Great news! As of 7/1/23, the custom server I demoed in this video is open to the public! Head on over to webtv.zone/ for a guide on how to connect.

Wow, this brought back some memories. My dad bought us a web TV (non plus) back around 1996? Maybe 1997. Microsoft had already acquired them and the service required MSN dialup for a seamless experience. They didn't have a local phone number to us, so the sales man at Sears signed us up for a local ISP and showed us how to input the settings for our ISP. However it wouldn't save the ISP info, so it had to be input manually every time you wanted to use it.. I put in that cryptic, random generated password so many times it is forever burned into my memory. Thanks for demonstrating this hardware/software Michael, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

Fun fact: about a third of android's OG developers came from WebTV in microsoft - there's a book about developing the system where they mention the three main places that all the devs came from.

This feels like the Wii before the Wii. The way it works reminds me EXACTLY of all those news, forecast, and online channels you'd mess around with. They even have a bop in the "Connecting to WebTV" screen.

I used to work for MSTV at Microsoft probably 20 years ago as a lab manager for our prototyping team. MS acquired WebTV so it's fun to see the UI experience that we bought and then migrated into mainline products. We moved to UltimateTV and then Motorola set top boxes for Rogers and other cable markets until the whole thing sort of closed up. Anyway, thanks for the memories.

The fact that there's an OFFICIAL Dish Network port of DOOM for WebTV has blown my mind clean open.

that "connecting..." screen and the boot up sequence in general has such a perfect 90s charm to it which is literally incredible

I can feel a new speedrun category for Doom coming up: “webTV, remote only, hurt me plenty” 😈

An interesting story with webtv. When I got mine as soon as they became available in the fall of '96, connectivity was quick and speedy. That Christmas it seemed that the whole world got webtv and there were severe connection issues. You had to open up a list of phone connection numbers and literally try each one until you found one that would work. You could go through a whole evening without being able to connect. Eventually they added more reliable numbers and stable connections.

Pretty crazy how many items devices used to come with, nowadays you’re lucky if you get a HDMI cable 🤣

Fun fact, I was commisioned to write some web-based games to run on the WebTV. It was a weird thing to develop for due to the control system and restrictions on colours, and general speed and capabilities (very limited styling, and some elements that work in a weird way). The games (and a web chat I wrote) had a LOT of players though.

I've never used one of these before, but somehow it still gives me a real sense of nostalgia. The UI is simple yet really inviting and well made, I really like it.

I used to work for Webtv in its infancy. That was nostalgic af. Thanks for the video

I can't think of a more boomer experience than WebTV attached to a gigantic rear projection television.

Life was so much better when the internet was being explored as a novelty rather than a part of our every day lives.

This takes me back to 1999 when my friend and I would browse the web and go to random sites for hours. He got it taken away after we went to random chat rooms and made fun of NSYNC and Brittany Spears fanboys. Good times haha

one of the coolest things about web design back then was you could include snippets of code that regular browsers would ignore but webtv boxes would pick up, so you could do stuff like call out someone using a webtv :)

I'm so glad you made this video because there aren't that many videos about WebTV and it was a big part of my life in the late 90s and early 2000s. My parents had no experience with the internet or computers but they purchased one of these and understood how to use it because it was very simple and much more like other TV interfaces they had used like a cable box. My father was a Korean War vet and loved surfing and reading stories and articles about the war. I was newly married with a baby and we were pretty close to dirt poor with no computer so my parents bought us one of these as a wedding gift. It was really cool to be able to send them pictures of their new grandbaby etc. For the life of me, I can't remember how I got the photos onto the device. I think I might have scanned them in at a friend's house or photo store. In any case, my parents loved it and I was so happy to be able to send them pictures from another state so they could see their granddaughter grow up.

It’s so cool to see these being unboxed and set up in 2022! Webtv was cool, and even though I never used it, when there was Jeopardy episodes from the vault airing during the pandemic, a few of those were episodes that supported webtv. Glad I can use this to finally learn all it could do!

I worked on the marketing team at WebTV from just after launch through 2001 and helped launch and market many of these STB products and many versions of the service. It was a thoughtful and well-designed product for it's time. It had a limited market window since PCs got much less expensive and way easier to use during the time WebTV was most active. But in some ways it was ahead of its time--today my TV does a lot of of the innovative things that WebTV accomplished 25 years ago. The engineering team at WebTV was full of brilliant minds from Apple and General Magic and went on to found Danger, Android and all manner of other amazing technology firms. WebTV was a fun and wild ride at the beginning of an era.