News Microsoft MSNtv Preview

Gizmodo previews MSNtv in this long, rambling (and often bizarre) article:

It sort of surprised me as much as anybody that I liked Cher. It's appropriate, I think to ask for a car driver to change the radio station when they're driving you around, but I'm still sort of new to this whole New York car thing. It still seems pretentious. I feel better about it now, though, because as far as I can tell nobody that likes Cher can really be too big of a prick.

I am starting to get worried, though, because I was supposed to be in Manhattan for a meeting with Microsoft - where they're going to show me their upcoming new version of MSNtv (formerly WebTV) - seven minutes ago.

We're just now crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, though, for a meeting that is supposedly somewhere in Midtown. That means my driver went halfway down Brooklyn to cross the Bridge, only to have to drive back up Manhattan to get into the Fifties. Whatever. It gives me a chance to sit in the back of this car, working, taking calls, and ignoring the scenery.

I think I could get used to pretentiousness.

I don't have high hopes for MSNtv, really. It's not like I have a long history with WebTV. I recall using it once a few years ago, on the way to my first Burning Man. My travelling partner Laura and I got stuck in Utah at a bed and breakfast - our only bit of good luck in what was otherwise one giant crash to the burn - and needed to reach some friends, who because we were firmly in the Cyber Age yet not the Practical Age were only accessible by IRC via a crappy, dial-up WebTV terminal. I recall being surprised I could get it to connect to a non-WebTV IRC server at the time, and from that short 15 or 20 minute experience I've formed most of my opinions about the platform. "Crappy, but with the occasional surprise."

But now it seems Microsoft is ready to give it another go, and in a way it makes sense. TiVo and Home Theater PCs have sort of snuck up on everyone to provide internet-enabled set-top boxes - you know, the very kind of thing that was going to revolutionize everything back when WebTV first came out.

But now our TVs have gotten more like PCs and our PCs have started looking more like content delivery devices, so perhaps a broadband-ready set-top web surfing machine isn't all bad. If I don't see some tie-in to Microsoft's other home media stuff, though - especially MSN Music - I'm going to be very surprised.

More wackiness ensues here