What did a WebTV box actually do in 1996?
WebTV Networks was founded in 1995 by three former Apple engineers: Steve Perlman, Bruce Leak and Phil Goldman. Their product reached American stores on September 18, 1996, built under license by Sony and Philips rather than by the startup itself.
The Sony terminal sold for $349 and the Philips version for $329. The service cost $19.95 a month for unlimited web browsing and email, and it needed no computer at all. The box plugged into a television, dialed out over a phone line and was driven from a remote control, with a wireless keyboard for anyone who wanted to type more than a search term.
Licensing the hardware was the smartest decision the founders made. A Sony or Philips logo on the carton told a first-time buyer in 1996 that the thing was real, which no unknown startup could have done on its own, and it kept WebTV Networks out of the business of running factories.
Pages did not arrive raw. WebTV ran its own servers, which fetched each site, reformatted it for a television and then sent it down the phone line, because text laid out for a computer monitor was close to unreadable on a CRT from across a living room.
Why did Microsoft pay $425 million for 56,000 subscribers?
Craig Mundie, then a Microsoft senior vice president, announced the deal on April 6, 1997 in a keynote at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas. Microsoft agreed to pay about $425 million for a company less than two years old.
WebTV had 56,000 subscribers on April 1, 1997, the figure reported by Telecompaper that month. Microsoft was not buying an audience at that size. It was buying a position in a room it expected to matter.
Mundie said the purchase was "a result of what both WebTV Networks and Microsoft see as a great opportunity" in Microsoft's own announcement of April 6, 1997, framing the goal as a better kind of television rather than a cheaper kind of computer.
The deal closed on August 1, 1997. WebTV Networks kept its Palo Alto offices and staff and ran as a Microsoft subsidiary reporting to Mundie. It fit everything else Microsoft was doing that year, with Internet Explorer bundled into Windows and money going into MSN, a campaign covered in how Netscape lost the browser war.
How many people ever subscribed to WebTV?
Growth was real for about three years. WebTV counted 250,000 subscribers in February 1998, and by December 1999 the service had passed 900,000. Microsoft also added a higher-priced WebTV Plus tier in 1998 with a television listings guide, sold through Sony, Philips and Mitsubishi.
Perlman left in 1999. "WebTV has been the most incredible adventure of my career," he said in Microsoft's announcement of his departure that May. He went on to found Rearden and the cloud gaming service OnLive. Goldman died in December 2003 at the age of 39 of a heart attack, having left Microsoft to build the email company Mailblocks.
Those totals were respectable and nowhere near enough. America Online owned the first-time internet household in the United States, and it was signing up the exact customer WebTV had been built for, using free trial discs instead of a $349 appliance. AOL still exists today as a paid subscription; WebTV does not.
Why did the television turn out to be the wrong screen?
A 1996 television was a standard-definition tube watched from eight feet away. Web pages were built for a monitor at arm's length. Reformatting on WebTV's servers helped, but it could not fix small type, wide layouts, or a site that expected a mouse. Anything that needed a plug-in did not run at all.
The connection was the second problem. WebTV was built around the phone line, and dial-up internet was adequate for text and thumbnails and hopeless for the video-heavy web that broadband brought after 2000. A box designed around a modem could not follow the web where it went.
The third problem was the computer itself. WebTV assumed that most American households would never buy one, because in 1996 the machines were expensive and confusing. That assumption held for about four years. Prices fell, Dell and Gateway sold direct, email became a work requirement, and the household that WebTV had identified went out and bought a PC instead.
Who owns WebTV today, and do the boxes still connect?
Microsoft still owns what is left of the brand and has never sold or revived it. The service was renamed MSN TV in 2001 and folded into the MSN division, which ended WebTV as a product line in its own right. A final device, MSN TV 2, arrived in October 2004 under the RCA name with broadband support, by which point the living room box had become a different category altogether, one that TiVo and later the streaming sticks would define.
The end came quietly. Kara Swisher reported at AllThingsD on July 6, 2013 that Microsoft had told subscribers by email, and in a post on its own site, that MSN TV would close. The servers went dark on September 30, 2013, and users were told to move their email to Outlook.com and their photos to SkyDrive. The service had run for seventeen years.
The hardware outlived it. Two community projects now speak the WebTV protocol: minisrv, a Node.js server written by the developer known as zefie, and WebTV Redialed, which presents itself as a replacement for the service Microsoft discontinued in 2013. Point an original terminal at either one and it dials, loads and browses in 2026. That is the honest answer to whether WebTV is still around: the company is gone, the subscription is gone, and volunteers keep the boxes alive.
Where to find a WebTV box today
Sony, Philips and Magnavox terminals turn up regularly in vintage electronics listings, usually far below the $349 the Sony unit cost in 1996, and often with the remote and the infrared keyboard in the same lot. Check that the power supply and the remote are included, since both are harder to replace than the terminal. Etsy sellers list WebTV terminals, keyboards and remotes. One warning before buying: a box on its own does nothing in 2026, because it needs one of the community servers above and a route to reach it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does WebTV still work in 2026?
The original WebTV service does not work. Microsoft closed it, by then named MSN TV, on September 30, 2013. WebTV set-top boxes sold between 1996 and 2004 can still connect in 2026 through community-run servers such as minisrv and WebTV Redialed, which reimplement the WebTV protocol that Microsoft switched off.
Why did WebTV fail?
WebTV failed because the problem it was built for in 1996 went away. Home computers got cheaper through the late 1990s, broadband replaced the phone line WebTV depended on, and the television proved to be a poor screen for reading web pages. The households WebTV targeted bought PCs instead, and the service never recovered after its 1999 peak of more than 900,000 subscribers.
Who founded WebTV and how much did Microsoft pay for it?
WebTV Networks was founded in 1995 by three former Apple engineers: Steve Perlman, Bruce Leak and Phil Goldman. Microsoft announced the purchase on April 6, 1997 for about $425 million and closed it on August 1, 1997, when WebTV had roughly 56,000 subscribers.