The WebTV screen size is 560 pixels wide by 384 pixels high, though content should be designed to fit into a 544 x 376 pixel space. Text size defaults to 18 point. Dark backgrounds and light type show up better on TV screens, so they are the preferred choices. It's also recommended that full white and red be avoided, as they cause screen distortion. Julie Richer, president of Mountain Lake Software, Inc., has been developing sites for WebTV and has several suggestions for designers.
Colors look different on a TV screen than they do on a computer monitor.
Some colors look brighter on TV and others look more washed out. So we test our color combinations by looking at them on the TV, not by trusting what we see on our computer monitors. Richer also emphasizes brevity, pointing out that a TV screenful worth of information is much smaller than a computer monitor's screenful. Keep your inline graphics small, or they may take up the entire WebTV screen. Each region is expanded to display its entire contents, and the outer table scrolls at the user's request.