ReplayTV Inc. Announces Strategic Direction For Future Growth

30-Nov-00

ReplayTV Inc., the leading provider of technology for personal television and networked entertainment products, announced an aggressive new corporate direction that will drive a broader and more rapid proliferation of its award-winning technology.ReplayTV Inc. will focus its corporate strategy on broadly licensing its proprietary and turnkey technologies, allowing set-top box manufacturers and network operators to offer digital video recording, video on demand, targeted advertising, program guide services and electronic commerce.The company will license a complete suite of software packages including home media servers, home video clients, content distribution servers and targeted ad servers. These technology packages will enable licensees to quickly develop and launch networked entertainment appliances and systems that suit their individual business models. The software is expected to appeal to a wide array of consumer-electronics manufacturers, personal-computer companies, telephony businesses and set-top box manufacturers for cable, satellite and terrestrial operators.This new corporate direction for ReplayTV Inc. will result in the strengthening of the companyís core engineering and development teams and will also include a reduction in its non-core staff.Anthony Wood, the founder of ReplayTV, will become the new Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board, effective immediately.One immediate result of this change in corporate focus will be that ReplayTV will commit fewer resources to the manufacturing and direct marketing of its house-brand digital video recorders. This will not affect the third-party manufacture and marketing of hard disk recorder products like the Panasonic ShowStopper with ReplayTV technology.""Our award-winning ReplayTV Service and Panasonic ShowStopper hard disk recorders have garnered praise from both consumers and the consumer electronics community. In fact, weíve won more head-to-head press reviews than any other personal television system. These reviews have included articles in the Los Angeles Times, ZDNet, Sound and Vision Magazine and the Philadelphia Daily News. As gratifying as this is, the most important person we want to please is our ReplayTV customer. We are dedicated to ensuring that our customers will continue to receive the same high quality of service that ReplayTV owners have come to expect,"" Wood said.Wood emphasized that ""Our shift in strategic focus will not affect our customersí ongoing enjoyment of their ReplayTV service. That service will continue uninterrupted.""""In order to best capitalize on the emerging personal television category, we have shifted our corporate strategy, leveraging our core technology, resources and management expertise to reposition ReplayTV from a consumer hardware and service provider to an enabling infrastructure and managed services company,"" said Wood.""Storing information like television programming offline and then making it available when consumers want it and in the form that they want it, is a new paradigm. By making our technology available to a broad set of system and service providers, they can all now make networked entertainment services available to their customers. For instance, with ReplayTV technology, even a telephone company can now offer better-than-VHS movies by downloading a feature film overnight over a telephone line, so that it is available on the customerís hard drive to be played the next day in real-time, at very high fidelity quality.""As part of the companyís new direction, ReplayTV has accepted the resignation of its former Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, Kim LeMasters.LeMasters commented, ""I am proud of my contribution in leading ReplayTV into the rapidly expanding area of personalized television. But the companyís new strategic focus will transform ReplayTV into a technology business-to-business operation, an area outside my background and interest,"" LeMasters said. ""I join the other shareholders in wishing ReplayTVís reenergized senior management team success as they move forward.""""Kim has been instrumental as a driving force behind ReplayTVís launch into the retail marketplace and initiating awareness of the brand as a leader in personal television,"" Wood said. ""We will miss his enthusiasm, leadership and tireless energy. All of us wish him the best of luck.""For more information about ReplayTV Inc., visit www.replaytv.com.

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