One weekend in 1995, Steve Perlman tested his theory
that the Web could look as good on a TV screen
as it did on a computer monitor. In 3 days of roundthe-
clock effort, he built a thin client for surfing the
Web, using a television as a display. He invited his
friend Bruce Leak over to see what he’d built, and
they knew right away it was a big enough idea for a
startup.
It was a natural project for Perlman, by then one
of the leading experts on display technology. At
Apple, he helped bring color to the Mac. Later, at his
first startup, Catapult Entertainment, he built one of the first systems for network
games. Now he wanted to bring the Web into people’s living rooms.
A little over a year after that first prototype, Sony and Philips sold the first
WebTV set-top boxes to the public. In 1997, WebTV (now called MSNTV) was
acquired by Microsoft for over $500 million.
Livingston: Take me back to the weekend in ’95 when you built the WebTV
prototype. How did you get the idea? Why did you decide to do this?
Perlman: For many years, I’ve been interested in making television interactive.
What I mean by “interactive” is something beyond just changing channels up
and down, to get it where people can have access to content that’s more interesting—
to be able to find what they want and then to be able to view it on
demand. For example, what we now consider to be DVR, or what you do with
your TiVo. At the time, it was considered something you’d only do in an editing
suite. If you were a network professional, you might have a disk-based digital
editing system.
I wanted to do all those things, and I even did a lot of the work at Apple. In
fact, just a month ago on the History Channel they showed some of the early
stuff I did at Apple. It was 1989. I was showing a system where we had video on
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the screen, images moving around, and animation, and several video sources.
You could pause, rewind, and manipulate the things. That was a big prototype
system, but we could never get it out the door because there wasn’t enough
content to drive a system like that. You could theoretically bring in live video,
but in 1990 there wasn’t a hard disk big enough to hold live video. Theoretically,
you could try to create all sorts of content for it, but who would ever create all
the content if there are no devices to receive it? So we had a chicken-and-egg
problem. Nobody would buy the devices because there was no content, and
there was no content because the devices weren’t out there.
But there were lots of offshoots from that work; QuickTime came out of

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