From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 12:11 AM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Hot News Alert: MetaTV in today’s Wall St. Journal
With special thanks to the efforts of our PR firm Msrdotcomm, MetaTV is profiled in today’s Wall St. Journal. We have arranged for 100 copies of the Wall St. Journal will be delivered today to our offices so that everyone can have their own copy. This is huge. This kind of coverage at this stage of MetaTV’s growth will help propel us to new heights, significantly raising our branding and profile.
Our momentum continues to build!
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MetaTV Tries to Fill Niche Left by WebTV, Others
By MYLENE MANGALINDAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ranjit Sahota, a self-described television junkie, came up with the idea for his start-up after hours of tinkering with set-top boxes at night.
The 35-year-old chief executive officer of MetaTV (www.metatv.com), who grew up on a diet of “Star Trek” and “NOVA,” became obsessed with trying to determine how to translate Web content to television. He wanted the content to look just as clean and simple, given the different design requirements of a TV, such as surfing with a remote control rather than a keyboard and mouse.
“I definitely felt that interactive TV was going to be the next growth industry,” says Mr. Sahota, a native of India, who grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Ranjit Sahota
Mr. Sahota’s tinkering led to the creation of a television portal for interactive TV that connects network operators, such as broadcast and cable TV networks, with lucrative Internet consumer services, such as e-businesses that offer shopping and banking, entertainment, news and more.
“We believe broadband Internet and digital TV represent the future of e-commerce and the digital-media industry,” says Allen Beasley, a partner with Redpoint Ventures, which invested $8 million in the company.
Mr. Beasley isn’t alone in his beliefs. Eager cable operators anxiously await the day that the TV set joins the personal computer as a venue for interactive home shopping. Analysts say the market will be big. According to Jupiter Communications Inc., the U.S. interactive-TV market will address nearly 30 million households and produce approximately $10 billion in annual revenue by 2004. And it’s not just shopping — interactive electronic-program guides, personal video recording, video on demand, e-mail, chat, all will be accessed through network operators’ TV portal, much like America Online Inc. is a gatekeeper on the Internet.
This represents a huge market opportunity for a wide variety of companies, including cable, satellite and telephone operators, technology providers and e-business companies, all of which are scrambling and hedging their bets. While cable operators are spending billions to upgrade their systems to carry two-way signals that will allow consumers to shop interactively, manufacturers of set-top-box software such as Microsoft Corp. and Liberate Technologies Inc. are cutting deals with companies developing interactive applications that run inside the boxes.
That is where MetaTV comes in. Seeking to leapfrog the pack of systems integrators and professional-services development companies, Mr. Sahota ponied up $200,000 of his own money to start MetaTV in March 1999 and fill a widely recognized gap in the iTV ecosystem.
MetaTV picks up where companies such as Microsoft’s WebTV and Liberate end. Users of WebTV, for instance, already can view the Web from their TV set-top boxes, but the Web pages look almost exactly like they do on a PC — filled with lots of text and graphics that are difficult to view from a distance. MetaTV automatically pulls the most important content from a Web site and creates a design for a TV screen with enlarged text and links that can be accessed with a remote control and simplified graphics.
MetaTV also allows network operators to roll out interactive-TV programs to a variety of set-top-box operating systems. Until now, companies such as Hughes Electronics Corp.’s DirecTV unit, EchoStar Communications Corp. and others have had to individually program their broadcasts to match the nine TV set-top-box operating systems offered from companies as different as Liberate, WorldGate and OpenTV.
Because there are no uniform standards, MetaTV’s strength is that its software and applications bridge various operating systems, be it that of Microsoft’s WebTV or Liberate Technologies. That allows network operators the freedom to scale their interactive content and programs, rather than customizing them for each manufacturer. “All these network operators want applications to make money and recoup their investments,” says Andrew Lev, the company’s co-founder and president.
Based in the tourist town of Sausalito, Calif., MetaTV occupies offices in a former elementary school where the clay-animated children’s “The Gumby Show” was filmed. The start-up has 65 employees and plans to move into bigger office space in the neighboring town of Mill Valley soon.
Mr. Sahota started the company after eight years as chief software architect for Sterling Software Inc., an application-software company that is now a unit of Computer Associates International Inc. He teamed up with Sterling colleagues Mr. Lev, who ran business development, and John Carney, who became senior manager of engineering.
The company’s board includes Sprint Corp.’s chairman and CEO, William Esrey, and Broderbund Software Inc.’s co-founder Doug Carlston. Both men were angel investors in the company. Mr. Esrey’s son, John, is MetaTV’s vice president of strategy and business development.
The company generates revenue from network operators and content providers, which pay license fees per set-top box. The company expects to be profitable by the second half of next year. Ultimately, however, success will be driven by customer satisfaction, based on the ease of use with remote control, analysts say.