What Port 2670 Is
Port 2670 is registered with IANA to a service called TVE Announce (service name: tve-announce), operating over both TCP and UDP. The registrant is Dean Blackketter, listed with a contact address at corp.webtv.net — a domain from a company that Microsoft acquired in 1997 and finally shut down in 2013.
The port is technically assigned. In practice, nothing runs on it.
The Story Behind the Registration
TVE stands for Television Enhancement, the core concept behind ATVEF — the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum. In the late 1990s, ATVEF was an industry consortium trying to answer a question that seemed urgent at the time: what happens when television and the web converge?
The idea was that broadcasters could embed interactive web content inside TV signals. While a show aired, the set-top box would receive a supplementary stream — HTML pages, data, games, polls — synchronized to the broadcast. ATVEF defined how that content would be announced, discovered, and delivered to receivers.1
TVE Announce was the discovery mechanism. Devices on the network would use this port to announce the presence of enhanced content streams, letting receivers tune in to supplementary material alongside the main broadcast.
WebTV (which became MSN TV under Microsoft) was one of ATVEF's primary architects. At its peak, MSN TV had millions of subscribers connecting to the Internet through their televisions, before smartphones made the whole premise obsolete. Microsoft shut the service down in September 2013.2
The IANA registration outlived the product by over a decade, and will likely outlive all of us.
What This Port Range Means
Port 2670 falls in the registered ports range: 1024 through 49151. These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services upon application — they're not the famous well-known ports (0–1023), but they're not ephemeral throwaway ports either. They represent a formal, intentional claim on a number.
The registered range is also where you find a lot of archaeology. Services get registered in eras of optimism, technologies shift, companies get acquired or disappear, and the port numbers stay behind. IANA doesn't un-register ports just because the service died.3
If You See Traffic on Port 2670
You almost certainly shouldn't. No modern software uses TVE Announce. If you observe connections on this port:
- Something is scanning it (automated port scanners probe registered ports routinely)
- Something unusual is listening there — worth investigating
- A piece of very old media software is still running
Check what's listening with:
Why Unassigned (and Dormant) Ports Matter
The registered port range has 48,128 slots. Many are actively used. Many more are like this one — assigned to services that were real once, or that never quite materialized. Understanding them matters for a few reasons:
Security: Scanners probe every port. If something unexpectedly listens on an obscure port like 2670, you want to notice. Dormant port registrations give attackers plausible cover — "oh, that's just TVE Announce" — which is exactly why you shouldn't assume.
History: The port registry is a museum of intentions. ATVEF's vision of interactive television failed commercially, but it was technically serious — it influenced later standards and anticipated the kind of second-screen experience that became commonplace through smartphones. The port number is a timestamp.
Namespace hygiene: IANA manages port numbers as a shared resource. Each registration is a claim on a number that no one else can officially use. Dead registrations are clutter in the global namespace, but the cure — widespread de-registration — would be complex and risky. So they stay.
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