Thanks for coming back for my second Founders' Forum column. My name is Phil Goldman. I'm the Vice President of Engineering at WebTV Networks, and one of the founders of the company. This is my opportunity to give you information about WebTV Networks and the Internet, and to give you a little bit of insight into what happens behind the scenes at WebTV Networks.

Two months ago I gave you a brief history of the Internet and the World Wide Web. You can read the entire column here. This week I'm going to tell you the story of the creation of WebTV Networks. It doesn't include the Microsoft part of the story. Steve talked to you about this in last month's Founders' Forum, and I'll touch upon it again in future columns.

So read on! If you stick through the entire story I'll give you a few hints about how to use the terminal and service, and let you in on what's coming up on the network in the near future.

The History of WebTV Networks
During the spring of 1995 Steve Perlman was considering how to deliver the experience of the World Wide Web to normal everyday people using just a television set and telephone line. He had noticed that the World Wide Web was increasingly becoming a place composed of not just computer-oriented people and sites, but "mainstream" users and information as well. The problem was that there were many computer experts on the Internet, but not very many real people looking for what these sites had to offer.

Steve realized that we could adapt some of his earlier multimedia work that allows us to display words and pictures clearly on a standard TV. This technology, known as TVLens^TM, is what enables WebTV Networks to give you a picture that is as clear as a computer monitor. At the time it was generally considered impossible to display web pages clearly enough on the TV. Steve applied an early version of TVLens to a standard computer browser and plugged it into the TV. Once we saw the results we knew we were on to something big. Eventually we became able to deliver a quality of video previously impossible outside of professional production studios.

During the summer of 1995 I had started thinking about how to deliver the World Wide Web on the TV set, so that many more of us could start participating in the Internet revolution. I was intrigued by the new video game players that had just come out, like the Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, and others. They were awfully similar to computers in the way they worked, except that they happened to be plugged into a TV in the family room, instead of a computer monitor in their study. These game players could serve a nobler purpose than just helping you to kill monsters and chase hedgehogs!

Steve and I had worked together many times over the last twelve years, but we were unaware that we were both considering the same problem. Luckily for us, our mutual friend Bruce Leak helped us join together to create this revolutionary new product. Although Bruce, Steve, and I had worked together over the years, we had never before worked on the same project. We knew that we could create an incredible product if we had the opportunity. This was it.

We started the company officially in June, 1995, and started bringing on the first employees at that time. We asked a handful of the very finest engineers in Silicon Valley to join us to create WebTV Networks. They were very excited by the vision we had created, and impressed by the audacity of our plan: to create the entire WebTV Networks system in less than one year. To this day we still have the very best people that we know contributing to WebTV Networks. I have to brag that WebTV Networks is the best group of people we've ever seen assembled, and that includes the folks who built the computers and networks that you or your friends might have used before.

The one year goal was so audacious because of just how much we were trying to create. We needed to make a reference design of the terminal, so that our consumer electronics partners could use this to deliver you the Sony or Philips product that you're now using. Then, we needed time to work with our partners to help deliver these. At the same time, we needed to create a web browser that would work well on a TV set. Not only did the display need to be top-notch, not only did it need to work well with a standard TV remote control, but it also needed to deliver the same capabilities that the standard computer browsers did, but on a product that was a third to a tenth of the price. Finally, we had to build and provide a nationwide consumer Internet service! From our humble beginnings, WebTV Networks has become (as far as we know) the Internet Service Provider with the most access numbers in the nation!

For quite some time we were operating under the name Artemis Research. We were trying to be very secretive about our work, because we really wanted to surprise people when we officially announced our plans to the entire world. You can still visit WebTV Networks' old Artemis Research web site by going to http://www.artemis.com/, as one of you noted in your email. For a while this web site provided a fanciful description of what the company might be doing, including sleep deprivation research. And this was actually pretty accurate, since we were working so hard! We had taken over an old BMW dealership in downtown Palo Alto, California, very close to Stanford University. Nowadays this building, which once held the entire company, holds one of our data centers and our customer care staff.

Right around the beginning of the year there was a highly publicized debate about the Network Computer (NC), and about whether it could be created for $500. Most of the industry pundits said it wasn't possible! At this same time we were getting really close to delivering a great product for a lot less. In fact, by May of last year we had already begun our nationwide trial.

We finally got to tell the world about WebTV Networks on July 10, 1996. We had a simultaneous introduction via satellite from New York and San Francisco. Steve and Bruce introduced WebTV Networks to the East Coast while I hosted the West. The response was simply awesome, so I guess it was worth it to keep our secret for so long.

As I mentioned we went on-line on September 18th, 1996, and Sony and Philips/Magnavox had their products in stores within a few days. Both Sony and Philips/Magnavox have been great partners for WebTV Networks, which is just what we expected given their reputations as the worldwide leaders in consumer electronics. Both companies have been a pleasure to work with and have taught us quite a bit about how first class consumer electronics companies create and deliver products to you.

I'm curious as to which of you were among the earliest WebTV Networks customers. If you bought a terminal and signed up for the WebTV Network in late September or early October, please send me some mail. Next month I'll announce our earliest respondent. I hope we can find someone from September.

But most of you bought your WebTV Internet terminal some time between December of last year and today. We had a great holiday season, thanks to those of you who bought a terminal as a present for others, or perhaps yourself. We were prepared in advance for the onslaught for the holiday rush, and so we had a large portion of the company manning the phones between Christmas and New Year's. I even got a chance to help a few of you. We still try to have other WebTV Networks employees work in Customer Care so that they understand the problems that you folks run into in the "real world" and so that we learn which new features would help you most.

We're now close to three hundred strong at WebTV Networks. We've grown from our humble beginnings into six buildings in downtown Palo Alto. We're now in the middle of our first WebTV/Japan trial -- we're working with Fujitsu to deliver a version of the WebTV Network in Japan this fall. We've also just begun our first hotel trial with On Command, and boy, the WebTV Network works really well in hotel rooms! If you're traveling to the Bay Area you can drop by the San Jose Hilton to see for yourself.

But most importantly, we're continuing to make the WebTV Network a more and more interesting place to be. We've already added the ability to access newsgroups via the WebTV Discuss feature. Printing support, Javascript, and RealAudio 3.0 are just around the corner in our next upgrade! And just wait until you hear what we're cooking up for the second half of this year. I'll tell you more about this in the coming weeks.

Odds and Ends
Two months ago I told you about the special dialing options and advanced capabilities in the options bar. I mentioned that you could bring up the advanced options bar by holding down the "Cmd" key and pressing "Options" using the wireless keyboard. A few of you pointed out that you can also go to the Advanced Options section of Setup to enable the Advanced Options bar permanently.

Here's another tip. Although the WebTV Network looks great on just about any TV, there are a few things you can do to really optimize its display quality. Perhaps the biggest advantage is to use the S-video output jacks on the back of your terminal, rather than the standard composite video jacks. Not all TV's have an S-video input, but many of the new ones do. If you have a TV with S-video input, you can buy an S-video cable at a local TV or electronics store.

You can also use the TV tune-up application in Setup to make the WebTV Network look as good as possible. You can go to Setup from the home page, choose the Screen section, and choose TV tune-up. It will take you through a few screens that you can use to set your TV correctly for your WebTV Network. You don't have to use this, but it should make the WebTV Network display as crisp and readable as it could possibly be.