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A service
incorporating access to both television and the internet. Founded by three
ex-Apple employees and now owned by Microsoft, WebTV was the first
company to try to provide these two seemingly incompatible services in one
place. It uses a special set-top box (made by licensees such as Philips and
Sony) to integrate the functions of an existing television set and a dial-up
internet connection, and can even display both at the same time. Microsoft
now claims 1m subscribers in the United States, but growth has been much slower than anticipated thanks to
the inherent dissonance between television and the web. |