Fate No longer supported Headquarters New York,NY | Defunct 2002 | |
Former type Subsidiary of America Online Industry Internet protocol television Founded June 2000; 16 years ago (2000-06) | ||
AOL TV was the name of both a thin client which uses a television for display (rather than a monitor), and the online service that supports it, both of which were launched in June 2000 to compete with WebTV.
The product and service were developed by America Online. While most thin clients developed in the mid-1990s were positioned as diskless workstations for corporate intranets, AOL TV was positioned as a consumer device for web access. The service is no longer supported by AOL as the documentation has been removed from their servers. It has been closed since 2002. Since the device was a dedicated web browser appliance, the cost of licensing a proprietary operating system could be avoided. For inexpensive devices, the cost of licensing a proprietary operating system is substantial.
The set top box for AOL TV was developed by NCI/Liberate using a thin client and manufactured by Philips.