Time to give the bad news to grammie: Microsoft is officially pulling the plug on its MSN TV service as of the end of September, a bit over 13 years since Microsoft acquired the service — then, WebTV — in April 1997.
For those who have no idea what MSN TV even is – and don't worry, there will be a few of you – the initial WebTV service cost users north of $300 for a dedicated set-top box that granted them access to the Internet via their televisions for a monthly service fee of $20.
Yes, that's right: For more than the current cost of Microsoft's Xbox 360 consoles, a box with a 122-MHz CPU and a 33.6k modem provided TV viewers with online access. And that's without any internal storage on which to store any interesting things you found when browsing. The device's wireless keyboard also cost $50 extra.
Pricing for the set-top box improved over the years, but not by that much. The latest generation of an MSN TV set-top box, RCA's RM-4100, still carried a retail price of $200 for the set-top box, remote control, and wireless keyboard. And the service prices for MSN TV remained: $22 per month for those looking to tap into the service via dial-up ($10 per month if you already had an existing ISP), and $10 per month for those looking to access MSN TV via their existing broadband connections.
So why is Microsoft giving up on a service that, at one point in its history, was one of the only way one could tap into the Internet via a television? As you might expect, Microsoft doesn't consider MSN TV to be all that necessary anymore.
"WebTV (later called MSN TV) started in 1996 with the goal to bring new people 'online' and to give those already online an easy, hassle-free means of accessing the internet from the comfort of their homes. Later, MSN TV 2 was released with vastly greater power and features. Since then, the Web has continued to evolve at a breathtaking pace, and there are many new ways to access the Internet. Accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to end the MSN TV service on September 30th, 2013. We are working with our customers to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible."
If it sounds to you like Microsoft's announcement will affect all of two users, we caution that it's wise to not discount a "legacy" customer base too much. Consider AOL: As of the first quarter of 2013, the company's dial-up service generated more of the company's overall profits than any other business area. MSN TV might be the dinosaur in a world of Apple TV and Roku , but that doesn't mean that there aren't still some tuning in – well, mainly logging on – the same way they've been doing so for the past decade.
0 comments:
Post a Comment