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Group:	webtv.users
Date:	Thu, Dec 19, 1998, 8:43am
From:	wuapr@corp.webtv.net (Moderator)

***New Post from Steve Perlman***

Wow.

The response to the my webtv.users posting last week was just amazing, and I thank you all for taking the time to send in your answers. A number of you asked why we (WebTV folks) haven't posted here before. The simple answer is it didn't occur to us. webtv.users was set up to be a forum for our subscribers with a minimum of WebTV's involvement, but if I may take your collective response as an invitation to join in on a regular basis, then I graciously accept your invitation.

So, let's get down to business. The overwhelming tone of the responses was about getting more information more frequently. Okay, will do. I can't answer all of your questions at once, but I'll take a crack at a few of them today, and I'll answer more in subsequent posts.

Allow me to make one small request. Everyone I know or work with addresses me simply as "Steve" (or "Steve-san", in the case of WebTV Japan). I appreciate the intended courtesy, but "Mr. Perlman" is a little too formal for the Internet. ;) Here goes:

Q: Are we going to support Real Audio G2, Real Video, and Netshow in addition to Real Audio 5? Will the complexity of Classic upgrades delay Plus upgrades or vice-versa?
A: We are working on the "latest version" of each of these streaming media standards. I believe that G2 is the latest and greatest from Real Networks, so that is what we are working toward. Yes, we are working on delivering Netshow (Microsoft Media Player) compatibility as well. We will support video formats to the extent that we can without delaying the introduction of the upgrade, but our top priority is supporting streaming audio as soon as we can. We won't delay one product's upgrades because we are still doing development on another product, but if the development schedules are close, we try to roll out the upgrades near each other.

Q. Is Microsoft blocking WebTV from adding features?
A. No, our mandate is to be as compatible with as many formats on the Internet that we can, given the cost constraints we have in our products and our development resource limitations. A big part of our motivation for working as hard as we do is the creative freedom we have in our work. Neither I, nor the rest of the WebTV team, would feel very good about our work if we were arbitrarily blocked from making our products better. As the only subsidiary of Microsoft, WebTV Networks is a very special case within the company, and Microsoft remains extremely supportive of what we are doing here, including letting us make our products as good as they can be.

Q. Why do you seem to be focusing on new TV features when what we really want are new Internet features?
A. We are working hard on both Internet features and TV features. There is no question that enhancing Internet compatibility on Classic and Plus is of critical importance, but it is also very important to continue to evolve the TV capabilities of the Plus. While some of the people who responded to my post say they are not that interested in the TV features, it is important to appreciate the fact that when we survey Plus subscribers, the TV features consistently rate as very popular. Also, these features are a glimpse into the future of television. Allow me to elaborate a bit on this:

As we move into the next century you will see broadcast television increasingly become integrated with the Internet. We believe that what today we think of as "TV" and today we think of as "Internet" will eventually blend together, taking on the best characteristics of both. Web pages will pop up instantly (just as you expect a channel to pop up when you hit "channel up") and they will have the dynamism and depth of high-definition TV video. Most TV shows will be instantly on-demand (just as you expect a Web page to be). In fact, children born today will find it hard to believe that we actually had to be tuned to a certain channel at a certain time in order to catch a TV show. They'll be used to just clicking on a directory of shows and instantly seeing the show start playing. And shows will no longer be bound to a linear presentation. The non-linear navigation we are accustomed to on the Web will be available for TV shows. It will be pretty cool.

So, while current broadcast TV infrastructure can't yet support this dream, the Plus makes the best of what exists today, giving you links between TV shows and related Web content, and helping you create "on demand" television by automatically recording shows on your VCR. Of course, if we're trying to blend the world of TV and Internet together, we need to work equally hard to evolve technology on both sides of the equation. And that is what we are doing.

Q: Do you expect to have slowdowns with the WebTV Service on Christmas Day when so many new subscribers will be signing on?
A: We don't think so, but you are right that Christmas Day (and the day after) are by far our heaviest load days because so many new subscribers register for the first time at once. Over the last year, we've been shoring up our servers in preparation for the big days. We feel we are in good shape, but it impossible for us to know exactly how many people will register as new users that day, and the process of registration puts an unusually high burden on our servers (activating a new user is sort of a computer version of giving birth). If you'd like to help us out on these days, you can do so by simply keeping your online sessions brief on Christmas Day and the day after. It's okay to connect if you need to (e.g. to check/send mail, etc.), but if it you don't need to stay online for long sessions, it will free up server resources to help get new members of the WebTV community started up. Thank you in advance.

Q: Is this the Steve Perlman who grew up next door to the Janhs in Chattanooga, TN?
A: I'm afraid not. I'm the Steve Perlman who grew up next to the Neiditzes in West Hartford, CT. Hi, Arlene and Dan!

Okay, that's it for now. I promise I'll be back with more info.

Thanks again for the great welcome, and Happy Holidays!

*SGP*

Group:	webtv.users
Date:	Tue, Jan 12, 1999, 3:13pm
From:	wuapr@corp.webtv.net (Moderator)

***From Steve Perlman*** Re: 700,000 subscribers?

Hey there. I just got back from the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. I'll be posting more on this later, but I wanted to respond to a posting wondering about WebTV(r) Network subscriber numbers. This seemed like a good place to tell how we did in 1998 and especially over Christmas week. Here's the latest stats:

We started 1998 (in North America) with about 200,000 subscribers, and we ended 1998 with about 700,000 subscribers. (In fact, in just the two months of Nov/Dec '98 we added more subscribers than the entirety of 1997!)

Our subscription numbers are often compared to two things: PC online services and consumer electronic (CE) products sales figures (e.g. VCRs, video games). To get a perspective on our subscription numbers, you need to understand why we are little differnt than either of these categories.

In comparison to PC online services, bear in mind that WebTV usage patterns are much closer to TV viewing than PC usage. Like TVs, WebTV boxes are typically shared among househeld members. According to our surveys, on average there are 2.2 individuals using each WebTV box. So, with 700,000 subscribers (i.e. 700,000 WebTV boxes actively in use), we have over 1.5 Million active users. This is one of the reasons why consumer-oriented web sites typically find they get more traffic from WebTV, proportionally to our subscriber base, than from PC online service.

In comparison to consumer electronic (CE) product sales figures (e.g. how many CD Players or VCRs are sold), bear in mind that CE sales numbers usually refer to how many CE products are sold from the factory to electronics stores, not how many of the products are actually sold to consumers, which is much harder to assess. Also, there is usually no way to know how many of products are actually in use, rather than still sitting in the box or discarded. WebTV's subscription numbers are how many WebTV boxes are currently actively in use. It can take as much as 6 months (and sometimes more) for a WebTV box to make it from the factory all the way to the point where a customer purchases the unit and registers for the service. Our partners, Sony, Philips, Mitsubishi, and Samsung have shipped well over a million WebTV boxes at this point, but primarily because of the time is takes to get through distribution channels (and for new owners to have a moment to hook up the box after it is brought home), it will still be months before we see these "sales" turn into "subscibers".

So, in summary. In North America, the WebTV Network has about 700,000 active subscribers (active boxes) with about 1.5 Million active users. Over a million units have been sold into the CE channel.

One more stat that everyone asks about: currently, new subscriptions are split about 50/50 between Classic and Plus. (This secretly delights us because we carefully designed each to fit a different need, and it is gratifying that each is finding its own following.)

On to Christmas results!

As you might expect, Christmas Day is by far our busiest day of the year with so many people unwrapping their brand new WebTV and signing up for the first time. The week between Christmas and New Year's is really busy, too, since not everyone sets up their WebTV the day they unwrap it.

There is really no other online service in history that sees this kind of sudden load all packed into a single week, since generally people don't "give" online subscriptions as Christmas gifts. Consequently, we've had to "invent" ways to "stress test" the WebTV service before the Christmas week to make sure we can handle the sudden influx of new subscribers without a hitch.

Those of you who are oldtimers may remember that we had some hiccups during Christmas of 1997 from the incredible, and unexpected, load. On Christmas Day '98, I'm pleased to say, everything ran smoothly, without a hitch. During peak times on Christmas Day, our servers were handling several new registrations per second, literally thousands per each hour. Our Network Operations (NetOps) and Customer Care teams, sacrificing Christmas with their families, were on hand from before dawn to well after midnight on Christmas Day, making sure the servers kept humming along, and helping people with questions on the phone. Response time on our servers (i.e. the speed the WebTV Network responds to a request from a WebTV box) was snappy throughout the day, and the wait queue on 1-800-GO-WEBTV was always less than 5 minutes. Despite the fact that Christmas registrations were almost double what we had predicted them to be, we were prepared for the worst, and everything held together. Phew!

Also, in my last posting here, I asked everyone if they could limit their connect time on Christmas Day, to help our servers handle the load from the newcomers. We would like to thank you for helping us out. Given the unexpected surge of registrations, you really made a difference.

So, that's all the numbers for 1998. I hope the holiday season was great for all of you. From all of us at WebTV, we wish you the best in 1999. It is going to be an incredibly exciting year.

*SGP*

PS: I know you are all wondering about the new member of the WebTV family we just announced (the Echostar/WebTV satellite receiver). As soon as I get a moment, I'll put up a posting about it. And then I want to get back to answering questions.

[note: Yes, this is legitimate. -aks]

Group:	webtv.users
Date:	Mon, Mar 1, 1999, 10:29am
From:	wuapr@corp.webtv.net (Moderator)

***Steve Perlman Posts About Connections***

Hello, everyone.

I've been reading a lot of postings here on connection issues (performance, disconnects, etc.), so I wrote a long posting on how to identify problems you might have with your phone line. It seemed useful enough for the general WebTV audience that we decided to publish it as the March Club WebTV Founders Forum. You can get to it by selecting here.

For the webtv.users audience I thought I would augment the Founders' Forum article with a bit more of what is happening behind the scenes. The following will make more sense if you first read the Founders' Forum article.

Your WebTV box and the WebTV Network both work together to try to get you a reliable and high performance connection, despite impairments that may exist on your phone lines, breakdowns that may happen within the infrastructure of the Internet itself, and traffic jams that may occur either at the "access point" your WebTV box dials into, in the Internet, or at the Web sites you are trying to reach.

In this posting, I'll talk about our ISP partners. (For those of you who don't know, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are companies that provide dialup access points for the Internet. When your computer or WebTV box dials into the Internet, it is connecting to an ISP. A small ISP might have a handful of dialup access points covering a few local calling areas, and a very large ISP might have hundreds of dialup access points throughout the country.)

The WebTV Network is different than other online services in that, rather than relying on just one or two Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for dialup access, the WebTV Network has partnered with literally dozens of ISPs stretched across North America, giving us an aggregate of thousands of dialup access points.

Working with so many ISPs provides several advantages to our subscribers. First, No ISP is big enough to have dialup access in every local calling area in North America. Because a WebTV box can dial into any of our partner ISPs, it benefits from the aggregated local access reach of all of them together.

Second, since the economics of the ISP business are such that they can't afford to have enough dialup modems to handle the heaviest usage periods, the best ISPs get overloaded (resulting in busy signals when you dial in) about 15% of time. Since in most areas the WebTV Network has access to several ISPs, if your WebTV box dials into one ISP and gets a busy signal, it will hang up and dial into a second ISP, and so on, "rolling over" from one to the next, until it finally gets a ring and an answer. So, rather than the 85% connect reliability PC users get dialing into a good ISP, our current statistics show that, on average, WebTV users have better than 98% connection success when they dial in using our "ISP rollover" technology (for which by the way, we just were awarded a patent!).

Now, no matter how broad our local coverage is and no matter how reliable our connection success is on average, this doesn't do you a bit of good if you happen to be outside of our local coverage area, or if you happen to be in the 2% that is having trouble connecting. If you are outside of our local coverage area, we offer a program called "Open ISP", where you can get a subscription with an ISP that is local to you, and then we'll dial into that ISP (and discount the WebTV subscription price).

If you are consistently having trouble getting connected (most likely during peak hours of weekdays 6 PM to 10 PM) and there is nothing wrong with your phone line, it may be that we don't yet have many ISPs in your local calling area so that we can roll over to another if one is busy. Our ISPs partners are constantly adding more access points, and we are steadily adding more ISP partners to the roster, so there is a good chance we will get more coverage in your area and you'll have a better time connecting during peak hours. Until then, you might give Open ISP a try with another ISP that might be less busy during peak times in your area.

Occasionally, there are technical problems or outtages with ISPs or access points. Generally, your WebTV box "steers" around these problems by hanging up and dialing into another ISP, and then reporting in the problem it had encountered to the WebTV Network. In fact, WebTV boxes are so diligent about reporting problems, that our partner ISPs usually first find out about problems with their access points from these reports diligently delivered by WebTV boxes. You may not realize it, but when you use WebTV, you are helping PC users around the country who also rely on these ISPs by helping to keep them running smoothly.

Lastly, it is important to acknowledge that no matter how carefully we have designed WebTV boxes and the WebTV Network to steer around ISP problems and report them, there are over 60,000 local calling areas in the US alone with constantly changing area codes and calling plans, and sometimes for reasons outside of our control (or even within our control when we've made a mistake), there are connection problems that crop up and need to be fixed. We have teams working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week monitoring the performance of the WebTV Network, including our connection reliability statistics. You can count on us to be on the case.

Remember, the vast majority of WebTV subscribers have excellent connection reliability, and if you are having problems, we want to help you fix them. Although there are quite a few postings in this group reporting connection problems, these are postings represent a small fraction of over 700,000 subscribers out there, of which over 60% log in on a given day, and needless to say, people don't write in to say their connection is working fine ;). It is rare that we encounter a situation that we can't correct. Give us a call and we'll do our best to help you.

So, between the phone line tips in my Founders' Forum article, and this information about how we work with ISPs, I hope this answers some of your questions about connection problems.

BTW, I had mentioned in my last posting that I'd tell you all about the Echostar Model 7100 WebTV satellite receiver. I talked with Phil Goldman and he decided to write about it in his February Founders' Forum, so I didn't repeat the information here. Also, I wanted to thank everyone who joined us for the Founders' Chat. It was a lot of fun, but we were a bit overwhelmed with the over 2500 questions and comments that came in. We have some ideas for future events that will work better with such a large audience. We'll be in touch!

Group:	webtv.users
Date:	Thu, May 27, 1999, 2:15pm
From:	wuapr@corp.webtv.net (moderator)

***A Farewell Post From Steve***

I wanted to personally share some news with everyone in the webtv.users discussion group.

As you have probably read in the press, I will be leaving WebTV Networks at the end of this month. Bruce Leak, one of my co-founders and currently the general manager of the WebTV Service Division, will be taking over as president of WebTV Networks. I'll continue to be involved on a strategic level at WebTV, through my participation on its Advisory Board.

I'll be taking some time off this summer, and then afterwards I plan to dive into some new entrepreneurial ventures. I have been working non-stop for the entirety of my career, with the last four years at WebTV being by far the most intense. As hard as it is for me to leave, it is time for me to take a break.

WebTV has been the greatest adventure of my life. It was almost four years ago to the day when I got the first WebTV prototype running in a spare bedroom in my house. Shortly thereafter, Bruce Leak, Phil Goldman and I founded WebTV Networks, setting up operation in an old car dealership. The WebTV Classic shipped one year later, and in the 2-1/2 years since, we've shipped 21 different hardware products in several countries and dozens of software releases. There are now over 800,000 WebTV subscribers of Classic and Plus and we have just introduced the first WebTV Digital Satellite Receiver. AT&T/TCI has chosen WebTV technology for 10 million digital cable set-top boxes. It's hard to believe how far we have come in so short a time.

But the most amazing achievement I think we have accomplished is the people that we've pulled together that make up WebTV Networks. Starting with Bruce and Phil on down, we have assembled a world-class team covering all aspects of product development, service fulfillment, and business operations. These are the people that create, maintain, and sell the WebTV system, the people that keep the WebTV servers humming along day and night, and of course the people who support you and respond to your questions and comments.

This team will continue to be there for you, not only creating new products and services, but continuing to develop upgrades for existing WebTV systems. While the WebTV system works great when you have a fast connection and you are at a compatible website, it can be frustrating if you have a slow connection or go to a web site with incompatible information. The team hears your concerns and is working diligently to address them. For example, there are upgrades coming later this year for both Classic and Plus which will address many Internet compatibility issues. You can count on our continued commitment to support you.

I know that you are reading in the press a lot about enhanced TV features for WebTV. These features are certainly important, but equally, if not more, important to us are adding the Internet features that you have requested, such as upgraded streaming audio compatibility, etc. which we will deliver later this year. Often, journalists will write stories (or ask interview questions) about the newest, interesting trends in the industries that they cover. As you know, these days the media is focused on enhanced TV, what it means and when consumers can expect to experience interactive television. While enhanced or interactive TV services may be a major focus of the media right now, WebTV's roots are and continue to be the Internet. We believe that to be successful in the future, we need to catch up to and stay up to speed with the Internet as it changes. With or without me here, WebTV Networks is committed to making this happen.

One last thing: a couple of the articles this week suggested I was retiring after I leave WebTV. Anything but! I've outfitted a state-of-the-art lab/digital studio in San Francisco, and the best is yet to come. Stay tuned!

I want to thank all of you for participating in webtv.users, and I want to especially thank the "regulars" who tirelessly have responded to questions or offered their views over the months and years. This group continues to serve as a valuable source of information for novices and pros alike, and it is a great place for people to post their views -- and for WebTV Networks people to hear them.

This group is one of the things I will miss the most. So long, and best wishes to all of you. *SGP*