SV Staff

Twenty-two years ago this month, Silicon Valley startup WebTV made a noble effort to bring the internet to the big screen with the launch of a set-top box that connected any TV to the internet. Noble because the World Wide Web was a wide-open frontier with only 36 million users worldwide. (Today, more than 4 billion people are online.) A good 92% of the American public had yet to even experience the internet let alone think about searching the web on their TV. Oh, and internet access in those days was via a “dial-up” phone connection.