I haven’t yet commented on our recent change to Skweezer to discontinue free WebTV access a few weeks ago (a.k.a. MSN TV, but I prefer to call it by the old WebTV name). To recap: since April 24, 2006 if you try to browse Skweezer with your WebTV device and you’re not logged in as a Skweezer Pro subscriber, you get a the following message:
Skweezer® Notification
Hello MSN TV user! Skweezer was developed for mobile phone and PDA users. In order to use Skweezer with your MSN TV device, you need to create a Skweezer Pro account. Click here to sign up for Skweezer Pro, or to update your existing Skweezer account to Skweezer Pro.
If you are not using MSN TV and believe you have received this message mistakenly, please let us know.
It was not done lightly. After all, how cool was it that a completely unintended group of users found a new use for our technology? Theoretically, Skweezer is a perfect fit for WebTV: the content is reformatted for the lower resolution screen, and our dynamic compression really speeds up the web for the mostly dial-up connections. It’s similar to the problem that mobile users have, and we thought that was pretty cool at the time. However, as we experienced rapid growth, it became important to re-examine our traffic patterns to see if there was some way we could improve service quality.
Analysis of the logs revealed that while WebTV clients generated nearly half of our overall traffic they were incredibly unlikely to click our ads, and this became a non-trivial money-loosing situation. Furthermore, the most visited website for WebTV/Skweezer users by far was eBay. You know how people typically use eBay? Refresh, refresh, refresh. Ouch. It is quite likely that someone who’s in the middle of some serious bid sniping is not going to stop to click ads except by accident.
Since our main objection to continuing to support WebTV users was the costly strain they were placing on our servers, requiring the heaviest (and therefore most expensive) users to pay for using Skweezer was a good call, I think. And while there have been some irate individuals who are upset at loosing free access, many others recognized the value and upgraded to Skweezer Pro. It works out to about $1.25 per month. In fact we approached MSN and suggested that they sponsor a co-branded version of Skweezer, but there was no interest.
While the imminent death of WebTV has been proclaimed repeatedly, in the meantime there are plenty of customers who could use a little help. While we can’t afford to run a charity, we’re happy to welcome the many new WebTV/Skweezer Pro users who have proactively addressed the shortcomings of their chosen platform.
I perosonally think it sucks that us MSN/webtv users have to pay to use a search engine that we have used free for solong now where the heck do we turn thanks in advance
While we can generally subsidize the cost of providing Skweezer service with text ads, we simply have not been able to do that with MSN TV users. MSN TV is not free either; according to the service plans, (http://www.msntv.com/pc/get/dial_service.asp) it’s about $22/month. If you don’t go with the 1 year plan, that will cost about $260 year. Upgrading to Skweezer Pro, which is currently $14.99 per year, is less than 6% of that cost. My first recommendation would therefore be to upgrade to Skweezer Pro service, as many have already done.
Skweezer is not the only compressing pseudo-proxy anymore. One idea would be to try the Google Mobilizer (and there are others): http://www.google.com/gwt/n
Another option you have as a MSN TV customer: lobby MSN TV to partner with us (Greenlight Wireless). We can create an MSN TV-branded version of Skweezer with no ads for an extremely reasonable cost per user or transaction to MSN/Microsoft. We could be up and running in a matter of days.
By the way, hello to all the visitors from alt.online-service.webtv. Feel free to add your thoughts here, I’ll pass them on to the customer care department.