Livingston: Your original...
Livingston: Your original idea was not just a DVR, right?
Ramsay: It wasn’t. It was this flamboyant, home server network thing. And we
actually got funded based on that. When we got into the technology, we realized,
“Hey, network technology isn’t quite there yet. The idea of a server is fine,
but how do you explain it to the average consumer?” We learned very quickly
that this was going to be a hard sell and a hard thing technologically.
At the time, this server had a ton of apps that we thought up, one of which
was DVR. We said, “Look, you can’t do everything, so let’s design a simple
server based on very low-cost technology. Let’s decide on one app that we think
is the killer app to run on it, and let’s do that. If that’s successful, then we’ll
branch out. Forget the network thing and forget the massive amounts of storage
and high cost and hardware models and all that.”
We thought the DVR idea—we called it PVR at the time, personalized television
or something like that—we thought this was a cool idea. It fascinated us
because, once you looked under the covers, you realized it was a very difficult
technical problem. The fact that it was a consumer product and it had to be
television meant that it had to be completely reliable and bulletproof. Jim
immediately flipped into this mode of “How do you make that work?” He
started thinking about this, and all his real-time UNIX and video-on-demand
experience started to come together, and we thought, “This could be very cool.”
So we clicked on it.
We went back to the VCs and said, “Thank you very much for the money.
We’ve changed our minds. Here’s what we’re going to do and here’s why we
think it’s a good idea.” They said, “Oh, that just sounds like a VCR.” (Anytime
anyone says that to me, I go completely nuts.) So we had this challenge of
explaining, “It’s actually not a VCR. It’s a lot more sophisticated and uses a hard
disk, and therefore you can record and playback simultaneously and do clever
things like pause live TV, and so on.”
We then hired people who came in and were very creative and thought a lot
about the user interface and how you actually make this work internally. In a
very short space of time—like 6 months from when we got started—we had a
good-sized team of people who were all working on this from different aspects.
One of the things I worried about in starting a company was . . . you come
from a high-tech background and, depending on the technology, if it’s cool, it
attracts the brightest. If you go back in history and you look at all the different
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