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”?
202 Founders at Work
Ramsay: I don’t know what it was. I still don’t quite understand it to this day,
but it was fascinating to go through that. Though it was not without its trials and
tribulations.
I’m not sure if people still get today that the combination of the technology
development and the getting to market of a product, the development of
a channel and the marketing and the brand building of that product, the management
of the media companies and their desire to destroy you, and the
management of this highly competitive situation every step of the way, where
you had to win every day in the marketplace and worry about intellectual property—
if you think about all these massive things that we had to deal with every
single day of TiVo’s existence, you realize that it was a big deal and not for the
faint of heart. You had to kind of learn to have fun with it and not to take it too
seriously.
Livingston: Thinking back on the early days of TiVo, what surprised you the
most?
Ramsay: Probably the thing we just talked about. The fact that these media

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• Replay probably did