MSN TV 2 Service Archive

An (at the moment) partial archive of content saved from the MSN TV 2 service. This was originally being maintained on Archive.org since 2021, but I have moved it to GitHub to increase accessibility. This archive mainly covers the home page and center content hosted on msntv.msn.com, what little of the main web services were saved from the MSN TV SG servers (sgX.msntv.msn.com), and MSN TV help content, hosted on sgX.msntv.msn.com and help.msn.com. Update data from used boxes is also included in this archive. The MSN TV 2 service has been defunct as of September 30, 2013, and the servers for it are no longer functional. This archives serves to ensure that this content will be properly preserved in one place for the foreseeable future.

Some of this content was salvaged from what was saved by the Wayback Machine, which was the case for all the HTML web pages, and a great portion was saved from scraping browser cache from used MSN TV 2 boxes dumped by me and volunteers from the WebTV/MSN TV community (Discord). Unfortunately, the MSN TV 2's cache does not save web pages, which makes going further with archiving the service near impossible.

If you're interested in learning more about the MSN TV 2 service, I have a wiki covering what has been documented on it so far.

• Note that some assets for pages are missing as they are not on the Wayback Machine or have not yet been salvaged.
• Some images for pages are not 100% original due to being compressed when downloaded from the MSN TV 2 servers under certain conditions (i.e., dial-up). Compressed JPEGs can be identified with the following string in the beginning of the file data: 456789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz.
• The home page also has a couple pages modified to more accurately represent how they would have been set up on the actual service due to the copies on the Wayback Machine not entirely matching the actual home pages. In the unlikely event proper versions of these pages are found, those pages will replaced the modified versions

Services Archived

• msntv.msn.com
  • Home Page (Only dial-up pages fully archived - Broadband home page only has assets saved; Dial-up home background and "TV Listings" icon images are compressed, and rotating pane for dial-up home has missing images)
  • Centers (Partially recovered)
    • Images recovered for "Using MSN TV", Money, News, and Shopping. All other Centers are missing images.
    • Most pages saved for all centers except Shopping, Radio (both not saved by Wayback Machine), Games, Radio, Sports, and Center settings (not currently included in archive)
• SG (sgX.msntv.msn.com)
  • Maps (Only search page and some assets saved)
  • Help (only table of contents saved)
• Trusted SG (sgX.trusted.msntv.msn.com)
  • GatePage.aspx (Anduril service script)
    • Bootstrap::Authorize (kickstart.aspx, originally from archive.midnightchannel.net)
  • Chat (partially recovered)
    • The original HTML file was retrieved from archive.midnightchannel.net and showed signs of outside modification, and was also missing images as well as the original parameters.js and scrollingdiv.htc files. The chat HTML has been restored to the best of my ability by removing obvious modifications and restoring scrollingdiv.htc and the code that was likely stored in parameters.js. This is by no means an accurate representation of the original web page though since so much of the original page has been lost.
• Help (help.msn.com)
  • Some Help pages and related assets saved