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 from cable companies and satellite
companies, who are entering this market and essentially giving away DVR for
free. That’s been a big issue for TiVo over the last several years. While TiVo has
been able to do deals with several cable and satellite companies, there are competitors
like EchoStar against whom we have had to enforce our patents in
court.
Mike Ramsay 201
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.

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