James Fee
09-27-2004, 08:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.engadget.com/entry/1253827625082461/' target='_blank'>http://www.engadget.com/entry/1253827625082461/</a><br /><br /></div>"<i>Designed mainly for getting grandma and grandpa (GM+GP) online, WebTV never got much respect from early adopters who scoffed at the whole idea of surfing the Net on a TV screen, but it did get a lot of people online who couldn’t afford a proper PC (or who didn’t want to deal with one), with its subscriber rolls topping out around a million when Microsoft snapped it up in 1997 and renamed it MSN TV a few years later. Fast forward to 2004 and Microsoft’s new MSN TV2 Internet Player can still do dial-up, but they’ve added an Ethernet port and are positioning it as a way to get online for the 51% of Internet users who do have a broadband connection but don’t want to spring for a second PC just so they can check email and read websites. Better still, it can pull double duty as a wireless media adapter that can stream audio and video from the hard drive of your PC to your home entertainment setup.</i>"<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/msntv2.jpg" /><br /><br />I'm not sure that these "WebTV" are really sellable anymore, but I think Microsoft has finally created a unit that might be usable. With USB, support for broadband and WiFi (using USB WiFi adapter) and support for the latest WMV/WMA and other Microsoft standards. The only missing parts are support for bluetooth and flash memory readers. Don't look for a hard drive because this unit is running windows ce, so you'll need to stream your files from somewhere else.