[jinto36]

WebTV largely worked better than I think it often gets credit for, and I echo the sentiment elsewhere that it felt "futuristic" in a sense. I had a Windows desktop, but we came into possession of a Philips WebTV box since my father was in sales and his company had a catalog of sales incentive items you could get for meeting sales targets. I really did not want use AOL like it seemed everyone else did, and the WebTV subscription was pretty reasonable compared to other options. We had the version with the hard drive and wireless keyboard. The hardware was really pretty decent- the keyboard was ok, I could print with it, and the feature I thought that really set it apart was the ports for video capture. I don't think they ever implemented a good way to use that capability for video, but I used it to capture screenshots from our family camcorder and attach them to email or post them on the webtv personal "website" or print them.

My early use of eBay was through WebTV, with both buying and selling, and it largely worked. You could browse webrings and read email from the couch!

Most of all, the dialing music was fantastic and I still listen to it once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y

When free ad-supported dialup services came around (Juno, Bluelight, NetZero) I alternated using those and WebTV for a while. As pages moved away from simple text/table/image based sites, page rendering quality unsurprisingly degraded. I think the version we owned had some Flash support but it was slow.

Looking back on it, it's impressive how legible text was on a 20" CRT TV in the interface (through S-Video). It was more usable than some modern "smart" TV interfaces.