Founders at Work.pdf

196 Founders at Work
Ramsay: While people had talked about storing video data on a disk before,
actually creating a consumer product that used a disk to store video was pretty
radical because, at the time, it was really expensive. We had to make a bet on
whether the price was going to come down fast enough to make this any kind of
consumer product. Originally, this thing had 14 hours of recording time and we
were going to have to charge $1,000 for it. We better be on a pretty steep curve,
right?
But once we had decided that, the big deal was, “How do you use the disk?”
A disk has got fast seek. It’s not like a VCR, where you have to record something
on the VCR and that’s all you can do with it—once it’s recorded, you can play it
back; it’s a linear thing; you can only do one thing at a time. What we saw on the
disk was—because it’s a random access device and that little head moved really
fast—you can essentially create the illusion of doing things simultaneously, so
you can record and play back at the same time.
How to do simultaneous record and playback, pause and fast-forward and
rewind and stuff like that cheaply and efficiently was the key attribute. In fact,
that idea of how you implemented that through a device called a media switch
and sort of managed all that flow of data—that became part of the Time Warp
patent, which was one of our most important patents.
That was one of the first patents that we filed. Figuring that one out was
critical, and had not really been done before—simultaneously recording and
playing back video in a very low-cost way that “just worked.” Maybe somebody
had built a massive professional video editing system that cost a million dollars
that could do that, but certainly nobody had done it to cost a few hundred
dollars, and that was a big breakthrough.
The second was the harnessing of the program guide data to actually drive
the function of the machine. Prior to that, and still to some extent today, that
program guide data was generated by companies who had armies of people
that were literally going through newspapers and calling up the TV stations. An
entirely manual process of writing down what was on when, and a description of
it. It’s scary, but I think most of that still happens today. Very labor intensive.
They would create a database of stuff and then they would sell that to the newspapers
and magazines, so that when you opened the newspaper, it would tell
you what was going to be on.
We looked at that and thought, “I wonder how accurate it is?” If it’s off a
little bit, it’s not life and death, but, if it’s a database that you want to drive a
DVR, and when you say, “Get me The Sopranos” or “Get me 24,” you are very
intolerant of not getting it. So that data has to be accurate. We went to this company,
Tribune Media Services, and we said, “We’d like to use your data for this
purpose.”
So we start to use their program guide data, and we had to massage it and
figure out what was wrong with it and change it and modify it and bend it into
shape for what we wanted to do with it. Then we had to try it out. It was pretty
wild and crazy. There were things wrong, and it was not clear how it was all
going to work. But we plugged away at it and we finally got it to a place where it
was pretty reliable, and you could download and it worked. It could drive the