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Welcome to the WebTV/MSN TV Wiki! WebTV, later known as MSN TV, is an internet access device consisting of a set top box that utilized dial-up access (and later on, broadband), using a keyboard and remote for user input. It was also a specialized service complementing said devices that they would connect to for access to the general internet and WebTV/MSN TV's own online services. The product and service launched in 1996 as WebTV, and a year later the company behind this technology, WebTV Networks, was acquired by Microsoft. WebTV later became MSN TV circa 2001, and the entire service would eventually be discontinued on September 30, 2013. This wiki is NOT about the "WebTV for Windows" application bundled with Windows 98, which is essentially a souped up TV tuner, nor is this wiki about any video streaming services with "Web TV" in the name.

What we are accomplishing with this wiki is to seek out, collect, and document as much information as we can gather on the WebTV/MSN TV internet product's hardware, services, protocols, and other subjects concerning it. Much to the surprise of many, WebTV/MSN TV did indeed already have people focused on learning about the product and how it worked, primarily in its hacking scene. Up until 2021, however, only surface level information about the product and service (especially in regards to its many vulnerabilities), or basic writeups about the technical portions of WebTV/MSN TV were available for public consumption, with most information about WebTV/MSN TV either remaining undocumented, poorly preserved, or in regards to some technical information, circulated privately by select people, never to see the light of day. We're here to make up for that and make all information on WebTV/MSN TV centralized, public, and easily accessible, using information that we have been able to obtain from scene sites, from our own research, and in private from those who know a bit about the product/service. We are here to rip open the guts of the entire WebTV/MSN TV service and technology and make it known for all!

This wiki was originally run by an anonymous person, wtv-411, from early 2021 to September 2022. Ownership of the wiki has since been transferred to JarHead, and future updates to the wiki will be published here.

For now, this wiki will mostly focus on the first generation of WebTV/MSN TV (pre-MSN TV 2) technologies and services, and try to make sense of how they worked. We hope to extend on other information we have though, especially with information concerning the MSN TV 2 seeing as information on that variant of the product and corresponding service specifically is extremely endangered, moreso than the first generation of WebTV/MSN TV products to our knowledge.

We are no longer accepting emails or submissions of any wanted content for the foreseeable future.

Interested in backing up your WebTV/UltimateTV/DishPlayer hard drives for any reason? Check out the guide we recently wrote on doing that: Backing Up WebTV (MSN TV) Hard Drives.

Want to install Linux on an MSN TV 2 box? Check out Installing Linux on the MSN TV 2 (RM4100).

Join the WebTV/MSN TV Discord server or IRC channel on Libera.chat (irc.libera.chat, channel #WebTV) to chat about anything WebTV/MSN TV.

IMPORTANT UPDATE - 9/11/2022: Hey everybody! I'm JarHead, the new operator of this wiki from now on. Things have been a bit hectic the past few hours, so things might not be exactly correct just yet. Outside of domains just changing, I'll also be publishing my own knowledge about WebTV that I've gained over the past 3 years I've been working with WebTV, so I hope you can learn as much as I have.

IMPORTANT UPDATE - 1/21/2022: Hey all, wtv-411 here. I'll just be blunt and say that over the period of time this wiki has been up, I've gradually lost interest in actively maintaining it. Now that doesn't mean that I don't care about the wiki at all or won't applaud the massive progress that has been made with general WebTV/MSN TV preservation efforts since it went live (I mean, seriously, I was never expecting the wiki to get this much attention and get so much previously unknown or lost WebTV content archived at all). This also doesn't mean that I intend to take the wiki down or any nonsense like that. I feel taking it down would be a giant disservice for those who find it a valuable resource. It's just that for me, updating the wiki and helping with archival efforts alongside that has gotten very tiring and they're not things that have personally interested me much, save for the few times I messed with the hardware (i.e., when I spoofed part of the MSN TV 2 service directly from a thumb drive of all things, and also the time I made custom TellyScripts that spawned two YouTube videos showcasing them) and the initial findings of lost WebTV content that were genuinely amazing to obtain and archive. In fact, writing the first batch of pages got very tiring after finishing the WTVP pages (which honestly is the reason why I even went along with the idea of this wiki), and with a few exceptions, adding onto the wiki was more of a chore than anything that I felt passionate about. WebTV isn't something I'm personally invested in. I just find most retro tech in general fascinating, and WebTV has been kind of a personal "white whale" of mine for several years that I hoped to find proper information on, technical or otherwise. Ever since I made that dream a reality with the creation of this wiki, I feel like I've contributed as much as I'm able to with it and the overall WebTV archival efforts in the following months since then. For various personal reasons that I won't talk about, I also want to just focus on my life and put my energy towards things that I actually enjoy. What this means for the future of this wiki is: expect way less edits to pages and expect me to not get back to emails as often. I'll still try to keep this up in one form or another, I'll still try to eventually find a permanent home for the content archive, and I'll still be checking on the wiki at times to make sure it doesn't magically break or something, but don't expect me to make edits to pages anymore. I also won't be very active in the WebTV Discord anymore.

Not all hope is abandoned though. Around a week before the new year, I figured it'd be a good idea to make HM from the WebTV Discord an editor for this wiki. Dude's way more passionate about WebTV than I ever could be and seeing his work with the WebTV Discord and archiving WebTV content on a private FTP server he runs, I think I can actually put some trust in the guy. He should be keeping the wiki somewhat up to date in the future, and he'll also continue posting on the 411 WebTV channel and will also be checking the email for any important stuff that I should reply to. For now, I'll also be checking in on any updates with WebTV preservation efforts from time to time and proofread any wiki edits from HM. That's as much as I'll be willing to continue doing, however. Running this wiki for almost a year has been an exciting, wild, and stressful experience, and I'm glad there's a community of WebTV loving people that'll still keep some interest up. I'll also just put this out there and say that I should not have started this wiki out by sprinkling in patronizing comments about "getting back at the WebTV scene" and nasty comments about them. The scene has its own issues and I don't agree with everything it's done with WebTV over the years, but I believe I could've done a much better job at addressing that than making personal insults towards them on the wiki that were more or less to convince people that they were bad. That was not good for the reputation of this wiki and also for my own personal mental health, and I've stopped doing that crap since. It's been fun, everyone! -->

UPDATE - 12/16/2021: We've done something that we thought we would never be able to. We were able to simulate some of the MSN TV 2 login process, and we didn't even need any web servers for this! Check out the shocking evidence at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWxO_8-0zOU.

UPDATE - 11/28/2021: Major news! With the help of natalie/agirisan, we were able to salvage the contents of a Sony INT-WJ200 box's hard drive, and we not only got a TellyScript out of it, but two Japanese WebTV firmware builds and other goodies we'll eventually cover in the future. TellyScript is named "JP_WTV_20000616.tok" on the content archive under "First-Gen WebTV and MSN TV > TellyScripts and DialScripts", and the builds are now uploaded to the WebTV/MSN TV ROM collection on Archive.org (which you should be able to find with a simple Google search).

WTVROMAssembler and the ROMFS libraries are now on Archive.org, which should ensure that they stay preserved outside of the confines of our content archive.

For older updates: Archived Updates

MSNTV 2

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