the press loved this idea that we were locked in battle with Replay. We got a
huge amount of publicity. People knew what TiVo was long before we ever put
the product out. So we started to sell it and it went well.
We had to learn a lot. I remember one weekend, we took the entire company,
which was about 60 people at the time, and we divvied them up and went
to all the Fry’s stores in the Bay Area, because they were selling at Fry’s. We set
up demo stations and...

surprised they wanted as they started using it?
Ramsay: The thing that really got them was pausing live TV. That was the hook.
You go, “Blah blah blah and it can pause live TV.” They’d look at you and go,
“Wait a minute. Pause live TV? How do you do that?” “Well, technically, you do
it this way and that way.” “That doesn’t work. You can’t pause live TV. It’s live!”
We couldn’t get people to understand it. We’d say things like, “It’s not like
the actors take a break or anything. You pause...

During that time, both their CEO and myself were getting interviewed by
the press, and they had us doing photo shoots together with dueling remote
controls. We knew these guys, and there was no hatred, but there was a definite,
very intense competitive attitude. Our aim was to get them out of our hair,
out of our business. This wasn’t, “There’s enough room for everybody.” This
was, “They have to go. They are the enemy and we’re not going to let anything
stand in the way of us beating them.”
While that was...

marketing it on an equal basis. It got so bad for Microsoft—they were putting
so much money into it—that they finally gave up. We thought, “This is great,
they gave up. Let’s celebrate.”
We then thought that the consumer electronics companies would come in,
and we were worried about that, because we thought it was a natural for Sony.
So what we did there was license our technology to them. We got some good
license deals and that sort of took that one off the table.
Most recently, a big competitive threat is...

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...