On Apr 20, 11:22*am, wrote:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:27:25 -0700 (PDT), ransley



wrote:
On Apr 19, 8:36*pm, "Steve B" wrote:
webtv? *I strive to grasp the concept, but am missing something. *I know
that we all have limited ISP's, bandwidths, dialups, and all the other
things that are dictated mostly by where we live, and not by our computer
literacy.

Yet, I really do not understand webtv. *Before I make a judgement on this, I
would like to hear some lucid descriptions of what it is, when it is used,
and what sort of people use it.

With the exception of ONE person in the last ten years, every webtv poster I
have read seemed to be a totally uninformed out of touch individual that one
would picture living at the end of a windy dirt road without running water
or indoor plumbing.

I know that at times, we all have to take the connection available, and want
to grok this. *I understand that portion. *I do not, however, grok that
99.9% of webtv posters impress me as having a shallow gene pool.

TIA

Steve

My gene pool is shallow I see, I had web tv. Web tv was and probably
is the cheapest way to go online , a cheap keyboard and box and maybe
15$ a month. It was for those without computers as years ago computers
cost alot more than they have in recent years. It was hardware
designed before Flash and other programs that need a quick and large
memory computer. Its limiting in what you can do and usualy slower
than a computer but for those that have no interest in computers it
works, but only somewhat now. It is obsolete in that it cant down load
most sites now considered large data requirements quickly . It can as
I saw years ago take 5 minutes or more to download to visit many large
vendors sites and not enable Flash. It had its day but never kept up
with its hardware to keep its use fast enough to be enjoyable, or you
had to pay for a new box. I dumped it when it became unbearably slow
and I didnt want to buy a new Web tv box. The only upside is watching
tv and doing some minor surfing, now new tvs have included this as a
feature. Web tv is dead, but MS is making money so they wont kill it
till it goes into the red I guess.

These days there is no hardware reason why WebTV could not be built
into the cable company set top box and go as fast as any cable modem
PC. *There is also no reason why it couldn't stream any kind of
audio/video. I really think TV is heading that way anyhow and getting
away from the "broadcast" model into an on demand model.
I use my computer for other things so WebTV was never attractive to me
but I do see where it is good for people who only use the PC as an
internet engine.
The advent of HD digital TVs has blurred the difference between TVs
and monitors anyway. The biggest problem I saw with the WebTV concept
was the lousy resolution in old NTSC TVs. I do have a PC connected to
my big screen, just for streaming and playing internet content.


Of course there are reasons why an updated and faster WebTV can not
be built into the cable companies set top box... That box is already
full
of all sorts of stuff for the cable company and uses a special
operating
system dedicated to accessing media content from the cable companies
special servers which are not a part of the internet...

WebTV was designed for a niche market of people that wanted to be able
to connect to others over the internet in a very basic and fundamental
way
but didn't want to invest in a real computer... Think of them as an
in-home
internet kiosk...

~~ Evan