Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Ramsay 197
DVR. That had never been done before. Nobody had ever thought of it before.
It was a brand new idea.
I remember complaining to the team once that we were like 6 months from
release of the product and we hadn’t recorded anything yet. I said, “Don’t you
think it would be a good idea to test that out?” And everyone would go, “No.
That’s easy. That’s not the hard bit. The hard bit is pausing and all this kind of
stuff.” And I’m going, “I know, but if you try and record something, the chances
are that it’s not going to work and you are going to learn a lot.” So finally I persuaded
them to record something, and, sure enough, it all fell apart and we had
to scramble at the end to make all that work.
That idea of driving the thing from this program guide data was brand new.
Then we had to decide, “How do you get it?” Today, you can switch on your TV
and you get a program guide. It comes down through the TV signal. We
thought, “Well, why don’t we just do that?” We realized that not all TV signals
have it, and you could only get a certain amount of coverage.
So we finally decided, “All right, let’s get it over the telephone line.” We had
to put a modem in this thing and it had to call up, and when it called up, we had
to have a server at the other end that had all this stuff. It would tell the server,
“I’m in ZIP code 94022 and I’m getting Comcast cable and I have the basic
service; therefore, send me the program guide for just that.” And everybody
was different. There were like 65,000 different combinations of program guide
that we had to sift through so that you got exactly what you wanted and it
matched exactly what your TV service was.
And we had to design this thing so nobody could hack into it. We wanted to
make sure that nobody went in and stole your TV programs, or, perhaps more
importantly, nobody could go in and find out what you were watching, because
people don’t like other people to know what they are watching on television.
It’s their business. So we had to make it very secure and very robust. We created
a reliable and secure back-end server farm—that we created from nothing—
and nobody had ever done that before in this kind of an environment. Stuff like
that was really radical at the time, and even when we released it, most people
kind of took it for granted. They hit the TiVo button and they got what they
wanted, and there’s all this stuff going on in the background they had no idea
was going on.
We had our fingers crossed. I remember once the thing broke, and we had
to literally go in there and change people’s DVRs. It happened very early in the
company. We responded instantaneously, and our customers hardly knew what
had happened and we got them back on air. We looked at each other after that,
and we said, “Thank goodness that happened right now, and not 5 years from
now.” We put in place some things after that that made sure that you could
never send data to a TiVo that would break it. Because you have 4.5 million
TiVos out there, and if you get something wrong in a software release and you
issue the software to all these TiVos and it breaks them, you are in a lot of
trouble. So we had to ensure that that was impossible.
One of the things we did was this thing called TiVo phone home. It’s like
controlling satellites that are orbiting Mars. You can only get a certain amount