Last September, Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, said Interactive TV was dead. Microsoft bought WebTV back in April 1997, and despite the undeniable marketing muscle of the company it still has only around one percent of the global Internet market. So, Microsoft has hedged its bets with WebTV for Windows, a method of viewing TV on your PC, rather the Web on your TV screen. Technical factors, cultural factors, speed of change, and the inevitably desire of large and powerful companies to mess with the market to make sure they come out on top, no matter what the best solution for the customer might be. TVs Are Rotten Let's start with the complication of technology.
TV screens produce awful pictures compared to PCs.
Most PCs manage 800 pixels, or at worst 640. So the moment you take a Web page and try to squeeze it on to a TV screen, you've got a major technical problem. It physically won't fit. Also, because the definition is poor, and we usually watch TV from a distance, the regular text on Web pages becomes impossible to read. In practice, this means the handful of people who view the Web on WebTV don't see quite the same Web the rest of us see.