Many of our users are also MSN TV (a.k.a. WebTV) customers because Skweezer does a pretty good job of stripping out superfluous data from any web page, especially eBay, and reformatting it for a smaller screen, in this case a low resolution standard TV screen. When this tenuous combination of MSN/eBay/Skweezer doesn’t work, however, our customer service department really hears it, and some of those things bubble up to me.

Why don’t they just buy and use a computer or a high-powered phone/PDA? Obviously MSN TV is supposed to be cheaper than a PC, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. After all, you can pick up a bargain PC at Wal-Mart nowadays for next to nothing. I think I have a partial answer. MSN TV owners don’t want a PC and all that entails; they just want to plug a cheap device into their TV, turn it on and surf the web. They don’t want to fool around with updates and plug-ins and viruses and service packs; they just want something that works like an appliance should. They’re not the most backwards computer users in the world (as if they don’t know there’s an alternative), but they are the most demanding. This is why I call them “owners” and not “users”; ownership implies that the possession serves its owner’s needs, whereas the word “user” suggests one who has adapted their own habits to suit their possessions. May we all be owners of our possessions and not merely users.

There are some that we’ve been in contact that regretfully admit that maybe they’ve been holding out too long and it’s time to consider joining the normal computing public. I ran across an MSN TV alternative today that may fit the bill for some. It’s called Zonbu, and it’s priced competitively and available right now. This article from OSWeekly.com compares Zonbu with WebTV very well. I think there’s a lot to like about a Zonbu box, especially automatic offsite backup and the fact that it’s so energy efficient, and I’d consider it carefully when thinking about upgrading/replacing a home PC or set top box like MSN TV which is only good for browsing the Internet and can’t run office applications or games or play music.

As far as I can tell, you need to get your own separate Internet connection, keyboard, monitor, and mouse in addition to this device. I’m not entirely sure why you can’t just add these things on at the Zonbu store, but maybe they want to keep it simple. Your upfront payment will be $99 for the computer + $160 for a monitor and maybe another $20 for the keyboard and mouse if you don’t already have them; let’s say $280 all together.  Then you have the subscription fees, which depends on the amount of storage you want for your Zonbu box, currently between $12.95 and $19.95 a month, and also an Internet plan, like cheap DSL for about $15/month, or free if your city provides a municipal wi-fi cloud or your neighbor lets you share. I doubt that’s an option with MSN TV. Even so, less than $30/month is not bad at all. Worst case, your first year will set you back $640, or about $53/month; best case (you already have some hardware and access to free Internet) your first year will cost you $255, or about $21/month.

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.