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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

So like webtv 2.0?

I think that'll end the same as the first version

Ahhh, WebTV. Brings me back to the glorious late nineties. So much $$$ was wasted trying to get people to use a computer on their TV screen and trying to get people to watch TV on their computer screens. Reminds me of that classic Onion article: [1]

1: http://www.theonion.com/article/new-5000-multimedia-computer...

Except pretty much everybody under a certain cutoff age watches tv on their computer, exclusively. So the entire media revolutions the cable companies feared, happened.

Just like the Apple Newton the first time, the world wasn't prepared, now the content providers are a dime a dozen, just bring in the apps. I would be writing this from my TV instead of my laptop and finally Facetime would be like in the Jetsons.

That makes me laugh.. As it so happens, I actually used a webtv when they were first announced. The problem wasnt a lack of apps. Around the same time I also connected a computer to a tv.

It's difficult to understate just how terrible attempting to use a computer on a tv screen is.

Isn't that just a UI problem? The different between the iPhone and PDAs was the improved UI.

Part of it.. but not entirely.

To me there's something very irritating about trying to focus on details (like a mouse pointer, or reading a page of text) from a distance. There's also the low PPI and size of tv screens; the viewing angle of the TV; the fact that your keyboard and mouse are sitting on your lap or whatever surface is near you (that's not at the proper height); that your chair/couch was designed for relaxing, and not sitting up and typing.

A small part of the could be fixed with a different UI.. but its still a bad experience.

No it is a resolution problem and a distance-from-the-tv problem. Text is basically unreadable, or if it's large enough to be readable, you can hardly fit anything on the screen

Yeah, Microsoft's WebTV unit morphed into a conventional set top box business and was sold off to Ericsson.

odd wikipedia doesnt mention any of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV

Feel free to update it :-). My GF worked for WebTV/MS and then Ericsson and traveled to various countries to do research on their STB usage so I observed this process directly. But if I wrote that it would be original research.

Here's an article I just found about the acquisition: http://www.lightreading.com/cable-video/video-software/erics...

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