What started at Web TV, now known ad MSN TV, will shut down on September 30. When you go to their website, all you get is this?ominous sign of what’s coming.
Web TV was created in 1996 by inventor and entrepreneur Steve Perlman. The next year,?Microsoft bought it for $425 million. It was renamed?MSN?TV in 2001.?Keep in mind when Web TV started, the Internet was still at it’s beginning. But in recent years, the number of users have dwindled. I think they still use the same hardware that was used back in the late ’90s. Eventually, there was an MSN TV 2 set up with greater features, but still fell on deaf eyes and ears. Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose behind Apple TV, admits Internet TV is still the same as it was 10-20 years ago.
And that’s the problem. Look at the smartphone market today. That phone you got last Christmas might be obsolete by this Christmas. Ten years ago, there was no Facebook, You Tube or Twitter. More people were going to the video store than using Netflix. Heck, 10 years ago, there were still mega record stores around because iPods were still in their infancy. I’m surprised it took Xbox this long to make an updated video system. But yet Internet TV is basically the same as it was in the late ’90s and early 2000s. What will it take for that to change?