About WebTV for Windows

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Microsoft® WebTV® for Windows®, the Broadcast Architecture user interface, hosts an instance of Internet Explorer so as to display pages in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). These pages contain further controls that provide such functionality as displaying video or pulling Program Guide information from the Guide database.

WebTV for Windows provides two main interfaces that enable your application to interact with it:

• ITVViewer, the primary dispatch interface that exposes methods to programmatically control WebTV for Windows. For example, your application can use the ITVViewer::Tune method to tune WebTV for Windows to a new channel.
• ITVControl, a notification interface that your application can implement and register with WebTV for Windows in order to receive event notifications, such as when WebTV for Windows tunes to a new channel.

In addition, Broadcast Architecture defines interfaces for objects that wrap episode or channel records in the Guide database. If you pass an object that wraps a Guide database record to WebTV for Windows, that object must implement one of the following interfaces:

• IEPGItem, an abstract interface for an object that wraps a record in the Guide database. The IEPGEpisode interface inherits from IEPGItem.
• IEPGEpisode, an interface for an object that wraps an episode record in the Guide database.

As an example of when your application needs to implement these interfaces, suppose you want to set a show reminder using the ITVViewer::SetReminder method. SetReminder takes an episode object as an input parameter. In this case, you must define, create, and initialize an episode object that implements the IEPGEpisode interface before you pass that episode object to SetReminder.

WebTV for Windows also includes a helper application, Tvwakeup.exe. For more information, see WebTV for Windows Helper Application.