I'm guessing you have, but since it wasn't mentioned, have you taken a look at these books?

"Streaming video and web TV" - by Michael Bosken
"Relevant social and technical aspects of Webtv" - by Andrea Dietrich
"Video over IP : IPTV, Internet Video, H. 264, P2P, Web TV, and Streaming - A Complete guide to understanding the Technology" - by Wes Simpson
"INSIDE STORY OF INTERACTIVE TELEVISION AND MICROSOFT WEBTV" - by David Feinleib

All of these are currently available on eBay (not from me)

Edit: What do you know so far and what resources do you have access to?

I'm not seeing much of anything on that other forum you linked to.

See here for a WebTV / MSNTV server software:
https://wink.messengergeek.com/t/i-have-made- … -2-server/13957
https://github.com/samdisk11/OpenTV/

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-12-19, 07:55:

I'm guessing you have, but since it wasn't mentioned, have you taken a look at these books? […]
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I'm guessing you have, but since it wasn't mentioned, have you taken a look at these books?

"Streaming video and web TV" - by Michael Bosken
"Relevant social and technical aspects of Webtv" - by Andrea Dietrich
"Video over IP : IPTV, Internet Video, H. 264, P2P, Web TV, and Streaming - A Complete guide to understanding the Technology" - by Wes Simpson
"INSIDE STORY OF INTERACTIVE TELEVISION AND MICROSOFT WEBTV" - by David Feinleib

All of these are currently available on eBay (not from me)

Edit: What do you know so far and what resources do you have access to?

I'm not seeing much of anything on that other forum you linked to.

See here for a WebTV / MSNTV server software:
https://wink.messengergeek.com/t/i-have-made- … -2-server/13957
https://github.com/samdisk11/OpenTV/

I decided to take a look at the books you mentioned. Everything except the last one are basically about IPTV or streaming media, which is not even closely related to what the WebTV technology I'm referring to is all about. Even then from what I can judge about the last book you mention, that seems more like something covering the concept of interactive television in general and most likely isn't too focused on how WebTV specifically works and the infrastructure behind it.

As for what I know, not a whole lot, even outside of what's been posted on that forum. All I know of in terms of protocols is the general format of the classic WebTV protocol used before MSNTV 2 (WTVP), a tiny glimpse of how the login stage works, and bits and pieces of interesting but currently useless info I've been able to hear personally from the anonymous guy developing that alternative WebTV server (who only chose to contact me through the services he himself developed for it, which I still find weird to this day). I do know the ROM format for classic boxes has been documented, albeit only in code right now: https://github.com/ericmacd/webtv-build-info- … bTVBuildInfo.cs. Sadly I haven't stumbled across a proper ROM to pair this information with (and the alternative server did provide some of these, but sadly traffic being encrypted with WebTV's own custom encryption got in the way of potentially saving them). As for what is known in terms of MSNTV 2, what's been posted on that forum is.. pretty much all that we've been able to know. Me and the group I'm working with are all just geeky amateurs trying to give this 24-year old technology some justice, even if for its original usage it's been dated for a long time now.

Now the server software, hmm... already known as well! It's a barely-edited fork of some PoC WTVP server by some kid. The original PoC was developed by a scene member in 2001 that the guy running TurdINC re-released 19 years later after being kept "tight-lipped" for so long despite the fact an earlier version was publicly released as early as 2004 by the developer themselves. I've taken a look at the code for both, and aside from TurdINC's release having less services implemented such as the upgrade and newsgroups services (not that I expect those and more to be accurately reflected in either release to how it was done on official servers), both are dangerously messy in code, don't utilize protocol encryption, and only implement enough of the protocol to make the box believe it has successfully authenticated (i.e., no challenge/response had to be added and as soon as you connect it just verifies you successfully) and make it display service pages. A lot can be learned from it, yes, but it isn't anything I would use as the holy grail of reference. TurdINC's release also adds web browsing capabilities (WebTV required web sites to be passed through a specialized WTVP proxy) which to them just means "link that specific service to that private WebTV server that basically has everything working". None of how that service works is documented sadly so even if I did capture network traffic for that (don't remember if I saved it) for the most part it'd just be alien. We're basically in this position where we have bits and pieces of some of the service/technical information, but for a while we kind of had to believe those scene people were the only people to ever have that information in full due to how prominent they seemed to be and how niche WebTV was. After the ego tripping from the host of that "complete" private WebTV server and the lack of approachable scene members, getting outside help is our last resort to achieving the goal of our mission.

P.S.: From my research it also appears the hacking scene for WebTV was more focused on messing with the service than anything actually useful, so that limits the amount of people we could consider contacting

So just a quick update to my previous statement of possibly having captures of the WebTV internet proxy service. I do have them from when that "private" alternative WebTV server (which just to be clear, is not related to the open source one) was still open and I had monitored traffic of the registration process and some other things (mainly browsing service pages and compatible websites) through modified WebTV Viewer software handed out by the host designed for service usage. The plaintext proxy service responses seem to be mixed in with what I assume are encrypted versions of the responses due to the corresponding requests being encrypted themselves, which to me says a lot of how well-built that server was.

Anyway, I bring this up as I had the idea of setting up a wiki or something similar with the info known about the classic WebTV technologies and protocols so far all in one place. While I can't say if I'll follow through with the idea, I do plan to assemble and organize all knowledge I've gathered so far on my end to make it all more coherent for documentation. It might not all be useful right now nor does it cover MSNTV 2, which I would really like to see work outside of video and screenshots for once, but it's a step towards making preservation and potentially a more open and transparent re-implementation of WebTV services possible.

Would like to throw my hat into the ring on this and detail a little bit about WebTV more precisely, as it's been indicated and is a little confusing. There's more precise detail thus far written in the Wikipedia page for MSN TV.

Some of you might only know about WebTV as "that thing in Windows 98" which is wholly unrelated to this. WebTV Networks was founded by Bruce Leak, Phil Goldman, and Steve Perlman, all three of which made major contributions to Apple's Macintosh OS. Perlman had also founded General Magic, a company that vaguely resembles WebTV's ideals, but on a more general appliance front. WebTV itself was built as a sort of thin-client solution, customers get a WebTV set top box for their TV set, hook it up to dial-up, and then, they'd be connecting to WebTV servers, where they would be served content from the internet. Ostensibly, it was like a proxy box, but built for the living room. In 1996, it was substantially cheaper than purchasing a PC or Mac at the time, and was fitting for the rise of the Internet (but you all probably know that).
So to re-iterate, WebTV was not a streaming service, nor IPTV. It was basically a glorified web browser for your tele.

Shortly thereafter, the WebTV Plus models were introduced, and properly leveraged the fact that you were using a TV, as that whole "Interactive TV" concept kicked in. You could have your coaxial routed to the WebTV box now, and the cable signal could now push ATVEF metadata to the box, so you could then, say, visit the Seinfeld website mid-show, and see exactly who the actors were and what else they star in. Proto-IMDb. Mind, you still needed dial-up, and the thin-client approach had not changed. The acquisition by Microsoft also led to the MSN Companion, developed by WebTV engineers. As a personal favorite, WebTV also released for the Sega Dreamcast exclusively in Japan in 1999, using a compact IE2.0 in the Windows CE environment.

Microsoft rebranded the whole thing as MSN TV in 2001, and the old WebTV platform would be replaced with broadband-based MSN TV hardware. MSNTV2 would release in 2004, and largely switched to being more localized, with built-in Adobe Reader, WMP, and Windows media server support. The MSNTV2 boxes also got hacked to run Linux, so yeah, MSNTV2 runs Doom.

Initially, the marketing was the idea of a low-cost way to bring the magic of the internet into the home, but by 2004, the demographic had shifted and it seemed to be mostly stubborn old folk who didn't want to buy into a PC, but still wanted to have e-mail and whatnot for the sake of their more technically-minded grandkids. Inevitably, the service would be shuttered on Sept. 30, 2013, and customers were offered MSN Dial-Up Internet Access with a promo. That's the end of it.

The reason for this effort now is because the individuals mentioned being involved in TurdINC (great name) have, as discussed, pulled a "take my ball and go home" approach, and access to his WebTV server is no longer permitted, with new sign-ups basically fully rejected. This individual was quite the script-kiddie in the day, and yeah, it's clear this person doesn't care for the actual preservation and maintenance of the platform, acting as though we were blessed to still be able to access WebTV at all. This is despite that his HTML proxy for accessing the internet was often busted, limiting us to whatever was functional in the intranet that his server offered, which isn't much when assets are missing, links don't go anywhere, just condescending behavior. The actual person who's made the server for him doesn't seem interested in working with anyone else, so we're stuck spinning our heels, either working to create an open-source replacement, or relying on the guy's half-functional server emulator.

We are basically reaching out to anyone who has documentation, books, their own software or utilities, or backups relating to WebTV, MSN TV, or MSNTV2. Evidently, WebTV is trivial, as we do have a functional server emulator, but MSNTV2 is at a crossroads due to its own encryption. Any help is appreciated, though.

Remember how I said I considered setting up a wiki with all the WebTV/MSN TV information I currently could collect and assemble? Well, now I can gladly say it's a thing, with someone offering to help host it for me right now: https://webtvwiki.net. It's nothing too special right now, the presentation isn't that hot, and it's by no means meant to be complete or 100% accurate, but it's definitely, in my opinion, better than what else is available on the internet about this product/service at the moment.

Feel free to browse the wiki at its current state and tell me what you think about it. Share it to your friends or people who you might think could help. Contribute anything for the wiki (as stated on the "Wanted" page) if you're able. Heck, feel free to take pride in the fact you learned something new or just heckle lol. I personally don't expect this to take off, but it's nice to have floating around on the internet at least. 😀

EDIT: For some reason this forum translated "lol" into an emoji. Not a big deal for me but I decided to fix that.

Not sure if any of you here still care, but I figure I might as well drop a small update here regarding my efforts so far. I was able to obtain a large set of firmware and boot ROMs for WebTV/MSN TV (specifically for the first generation of hardware) from two veteran WebTV hackers, in both their downloadable (chunked) and full formats, and I've cleaned up the original collection to the best of my abilities to upload them to both my wiki's content archive and the Internet Archive. You can access the Internet Archive version at https://archive.org/details/WebtvMsntvRomCollection, the one on my content archive is available by clicking the "The WebTV Files Content Archive" link on my wiki's sidebar (link is in the OP) and navigating to "First-Gen WebTV and MSN TV > ROM Info & Archive > ROM Images". There are no differences between the two versions of the archive aside from the IA version removing the EchoStar Doom and YDKJ ROMs as I felt those didn't fit there. Not sure how useful the main firmware ROMs will be right now, but in the event anyone figures out how to disassemble and analyze them to figure out other things about WebTV/MSN TV, that would be wonderful to me!

In other news, still on the lookout for other crucial information or data concerning WebTV/MSN TV: https://webtvwiki.net/wiki/Wanted.

That service was never available in my country, but I always enjoy and appreciate when things are preserved. You deserve kudos for your effort!

vetz wrote on 2021-04-30, 20:29:

That service was never available in my country, but I always enjoy and appreciate when things are preserved. You deserve kudos for your effort!

I cannot express in words how happy I am to see support like this during this whole journey. Kudos greatly taken!

The whole effort in general has been quite the drag. Not only does like 5% of the entire world even know what a WebTV or MSN TV is or care about it to the extent that I do, but the hackers who were originally in the scene still seem to be using WebTV for their own interests rather than for the greater good. Most in the scene who even studied the protocol, data formats, or have a giant collection of the original service content that I could actually get in contact with (which is very few, generally speaking) don't seem to be willing to share a whole lot, and when asked to even consider documenting stuff about the service that's still undocumented they either cite "legal issues" (which IMO is total bullcrap) or just ignored my questions about that. It was a surprise a couple of those people even considered sharing any of the ROMs to me. Then again, from what I could read up on the WebTV hacking scene, they just had a really big exclusivity problem where people who found "critical information" (basically any info on the service's inner workings) would usually keep it circulated with people they considered close friends, or else they'd have to face the painful experience of Microsoft closing the holes they exploited and having to go back to the drawing board.(</sarcasm>) There are other problems with the hacking scene of the day that I think just contributed to the lack of any interesting or useful information about WebTV/MSN TV, but that would probably require more than one post. 😉

Anyway, I've just been watching analytics in hopes that someone has come across my wiki and potentially take an interest in helping out for the cause. I feel that's the only real way this can take off since WebTV/MSN TV is just very obscure and wasn't very popular even in its heydey. In fact most of its real users were like senior citizens if I'm being real here.

Perhaps worth noting is that the designer of the original WebTV interface was the late Keith Ohlfs, who also designed NeXTSTEP's windows and icons circa 1987.

pleonard wrote on 2021-04-30, 21:09:

Perhaps worth noting is that the designer of the original WebTV interface was the late Keith Ohlfs, who also designed NeXTSTEP's windows and icons circa 1987.

Ooo. Interesting to know.

Now that you mention it, some of the NeXTSTEP icons do bear some resemblance to WebTV's lol.

Hey people. I'm feeling generous so I might as well update you guys on what's been going on with the WebTV preservation efforts so far:

• Two revisions of internal WebTV document "Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom" have been uploaded onto the WebTV/MSN TV Wiki and the MEGA content archive. Documentation for Microsoft TV Server was uploaded to the content archive as well.
• Andy McFadden, former WebTV software engineer, has written an entire de-tokenizer for the proprietary dialing script format used by WebTV/MSN TV, named TellyScript, which has allowed me and others to finally understand this format. It's still a work in progress, but the code is on GitHub and in the public domain: https://gist.github.com/fadden/09b581dbb04794 … 119048dc05e8bea
• A YouTube channel focused on uploading WebTV/MSN TV-related media has been started, with one of the videos uploaded being a compilation of high quality video clips from a WebTV demo installed onto factory WebTV Plus units.
• After paying attention to the fact that WebTV Plus hard drives store TellyScripts and other potentially crucial data, I've successfully extracted a TellyScript from a real WebTV unit and I intend to salvage more TellyScripts and other data from dumps of these hard drives (granted the TellyScripts can expose the calling number of the landline used to connect to the WebTV/MSN TV service, so I'll try to be cautious on that front).
• More information on certain WebTV/MSN TV topics has been added to the WebTV Wiki, including but not limited to info on ROMs, companies involved with WebTV/MSN TV, and data formats related to WebTV/MSN TV. I've also refined the wiki to be less anti-hacking scene and less angsty in general.

There's a bit more that's been done that I haven't listed here, but that's most of the major progress made since last time I posted here. It's no complete WebTV server, but I'm honestly glad breakthroughs have been made at all and that the information and data collected has a home to reside on. Only time can tell what more might be discovered. 😀