Founders at Work.pdf

202 Founders at Work
More recently, TiVo has done deals with Comcast. It’s renewed its deal with
DIRECTV, so it’s moving in this direction of taking its technology and embedding
into those third-party platforms. I think that is going to be a trend for the
future.
Livingston: Do you think if the networks had realized what you were doing
early on that they would have tried to do something about you guys?
Ramsay: Oh, they did. That’s a whole other story in its own right. Very early on,
this notion of digital recording got the attention of the networks, and it was
clear that they were concerned about what we were doing.
About the same time, we had built a prototype—it was a little thing based
on a PC, a little box with a handle—and we’d take it around to show it to
people. We had hired a guy called Stacey Jolna, who was from the media industry.
He would take me around all these places to meet his contacts and sort of
try to convince them that we weren’t really a threat—that we were an advantage
and there were some advertising opportunities and audience measurements
things and all that kind of stuff. After the statutory hugging and talking about
their kids and their families and what they’ve been doing, it was not unusual for
them to let us know how they felt about what we were doing and show us the
door. “You’re evil. Don’t come back. You’re going to destroy us.”
We’d see quotes in the newspaper about how we were going to destroy
the US economy. People were becoming very irrational. We got threats of
lawsuits—all the time, every week. And we had people on our board from NBC
and Discovery and all sorts of other media companies.
Replay probably did us a fabulous favor when they stepped across the line.
There’s a line in the sand that those media companies think about. You don’t
know where it is, but if you step over it, they’re going to get you. Replay
stepped over it by doing automatic commercial skipping. You didn’t even have
to fast-forward through the commercials. They just found out where they were
and they eliminated them. And they let you share programs over the Internet.
That crossed the line. They got sued. They were the bad guy; therefore, we
were the good guy.
At the end of the day, actually, I think we got a lot of respect from those
companies, but it was a difficult time and these are powerful companies that
were hell-bent on getting rid of us. To this day, it amazes me that those
companies eventually decided to invest in TiVo, actually put money into the
company, and probably made the difference between TiVo surviving and not
surviving when the Bubble burst. That difference was attributed to Disney,
Viacom, Discovery Communications, NBC, Showtime, HBO, and Time
Warner. They all put money into the company. They put one representative on
the board—NBC has always had a representative, John Hendricks from
Discovery was the representative for a lot of the others. There was something
like $50 million that we raised from that group of people, and that got us by.
Livingston: Do you think they thought, “If we can’t beat ’em, join ’em”?