[cwerdna]

For those that remember TiVolutionary (I never met him in person), I got an email from CES this morning and said "wow" when I saw the name Richard Bullwinkle. It seems that he (or someone w/this name) is at a chief evangelist at Rovi now.

A few searches turned up stuff like:
http://www.itvt.com/interview/5222/radio-rovi-macrovision-chief-evangelist-richard-bullwinkle
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6671345.html

I remember long ago, after unknown circumstances, he ended up at Replay but hadn't heard what happened after Replay...

 

[Dan203]

He's been with them for a while now.

Dan

 

[Mars Rocket]

Huh. Got a hair cut. Doesn't look like he used to.

 

[sbourgeo]

Huh. Got a hair cut. Doesn't look like he used to.

I'm guessing that you probably have to ditch the stoner look when you're one of the public faces of a company.

 

[Phantom Gremlin]

A search for Macrovision evil returns quite a few hits. But I can't blame Richard, a man's gotta eat! At least he's not working for a company, like Altria, that I'd call merchants of death.

 

[bareyb]

Huh. Got a hair cut. Doesn't look like he used to.

Wow. No kidding. I never would have recognized him. I guess we're all getting older...

 

[JustRichard]

Ouch! Ya'll are funny. Macrovision > Rovi isn't as evil as the company you remember from your childhood, keeping you from copying VCR tapes. We're powering some very cool products like Amazon, iTunes, Pandora, Slacker, Spotify and many more with metadata, as well as putting guides in a few million TV sets.

And TiVo, bless them, allowed me to be their front man when yes, I looked like a drug dealer.

But all is not forgotten. Here was a little story I told just the other day:
http://www.multichannel.com/blog/BIT_RATE/26290-Ten_Years_Ago_TiVo_s_Black_Thursday_Crash.php

It's not quite right the way the reporter got it -- it was more TiVo's bug than TMS's, but that was a long time ago, and both companies deliver far better products today.

Anyway, TiVo remains dear in my heart.

 

[ZeoTiVo]

There is an interesting stat in there (ETA - though TiVoStephen tells us the stat is wrong)

100 days following the first customer deliveries, happened when TMS sent two different data sets for the same show. The TiVo database wasn't set up to handle that exception - and went belly up.

While TiVo had only sold 120 DVRs

 

[TiVoStephen]

Either the reporter misquoted, or Richard's recollection is a bit off. (But we still love you, Richard!)

The event he refers to wasn't caused by Tribune (it was caused by program object data distributed from two different TiVo servers, with incompatible indexes), it didn't affect every box, and we had far more than 120 boxes sold at the time. We DID have to replace hundreds of boxes, though. It was a huge deal, and fundamentally changed the degree of defensiveness in how we developed and released software from then on.

EDIT: Oops, now I see Richard already said that the reporter didn't quite get across that it was more TiVo's bug than Tribune's.

 

[samo]

Hi Stephen,
Just out of curiosity, I bought the very first TiVo sold at my local Sears in Sep'1999. PTV100, serial #000-1349-1977-7070.
Where does it put me - first 10,000 TiVo users? First 20,000?

 

[TiVoStephen]

Samo, yup, something like that! We went public in September 1999, so our subscriber numbers from around that period are probably in our financial reports somewhere on the web.