I worked at WebTV after it was acquired by Microsoft. My officemate was a dev that fixed browser crashes on the box. 90% of them were for porn sites. Which meant that he was paid by Microsoft to visit porn sites all day
The vast majority of my calls were from people (drunkenly) complaining that the internet was "busted". Typically the entire internet being down to them was actually code which meant that a certain porn site didn't work on WebTV.
They almost always hung up before admitting the actual problem. When they didn't, I wished they had.
Even in the late 90s there was a community of WebTV hackers. One thing people focused on was the “tricks menu”[1] that required typing in a password to get into it. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about what the codes “meant”. The reality was they were just chosen to be something easy to remember that could be typed with only one’s left hand on those IR keyboards.
[1] http://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/Services/Gallery/...
It's surprising that they never shipped V.92 support for most of these devices, you would think that saving tens of seconds would be a boon for an appliance product like this.
Has there been any work done to put old WebTV clients to use?
It did have a life for several years after I left in MSNTV. Maybe someone else here knows its fate.
Did Microsoft have a written mandate to improve the performance of these websites? How was this communicated?