Scott Watson
My friend, Scott Watson, died six years ago in a plane crash.
There are some stories about Scott I wanted to share to highlight his genius.
I don’t know if anyone else will read this, but I felt the need to write this down before I forget or shuffle off this mortal coil myself.
Scott and I met in 1995 when I first joined Disney. I was with the Disney Channel and Scott was with Imagineering and neither of us would stop talking about “the internet”. Scott had registered the domain disney.com and was scott@disney.com as a result.
We bonded over being tech geeks and sharing the love of making new things.
I explained how television technology worked and he explained much of the mysterious world of software to me. In the days before cybersecurity locked everything down we did stuff like setting up internal IRC servers on boxes running early linux distributions to chat during the workday.
There’s a few projects that Scott did that I’ll go into a little detail on. If you are not into the deep magic of the interwebs, it might not make a lot of sense. But I’m going to write it up anyways.
Go Radio
As the internet started to hit the news and get popular, audio streaming over the internet was a hot topic. At the time, to stream audio required a dedicated server running something like rtmp or the proprietary Realplayer server. Running these kind of servers was expensive and didn’t scale well.
The other new thing in the corporate world was caching images in a internet proxy server since internet bandwidth was expensive. The caching was extensive as most of the image assets were easy to track by site and filename and almost all internet access was via proxy servers.
We were bullshitting about “push technology” and other early web ideas when Scott had the idea about disguising audio files as images to get them cached in the proxy servers.
Disney had recently launched the ill fated Go.com portal and adding features to it was on the mind of Disney’s tech execs. After a bit of testing, Scott proposed Go Radio, which was a service on go.com to stream audio using mp3s (I think) disguised as image files so they’d be stored in enterprise proxy servers, reducing the bandwidth cost and eliminating the need for dedicated streaming servers.
And in the heady days of Web 1.0, Go Radio launched and was popular. We even were able to insert precious advertising spots to earn that filthy lucre.
Once the portal era and go.com evaporated, internet access to the companies expanded and newer streaming tech took over eliminated the need for Go Radio, but it was a wonderful hack that Scott came up with.
Interactive Monday Night Football
In the late nineties, I got involved with the first serious attempts to do interactive television. This holy grail of network television execs was to magically make money by people interacting with a broadcast television channel.
Web TV had launched and made a splash that had the TV execs salivating. For those that don’t know, Web TV was a small computer that used a television as a screen and phone line for internet access via an internal modem. It was a cheap way to get online, but several features were in a kind of walled garden arrangement, similar to AOL at the time. Microsoft bought Web TV soon after launch and it became a hot topic.
The TV engineers got together with a group of the nascent internet engineering community and formed the standards group ATVEF. I brought Scott along to the meetings, as my coding skills are non-existent.
In the older analog tv standard NTSC, there were specific “lines” in the signal format that allowed for transmission of digital data over the broadcast signal. TV engineers used these lines for sending triggers for broadcast gear, like the logos that pop up in the corner when you are watching a local TV station or test signals.
The idea at ATVEF was to have a standard for sending code via these lines that could be acted upon by devices that had TV tuners
Scott, as usual, came away energized and had big plans.
Scott helped build out a team that created a system to send out the interactive TV data to allow people to play games along with ABC’s Monday Night Football. He was able to convince the Disney/ABC execs to allow the data to be injected into the national ABC feed, the holiest of holys in broadcast terms.
While it was a limited audience of people who could see it, it was one of the first real uses of interactive TV. An amazing effort on the cutting edge of internet and television technology at the time.
Moviebeam
Scott was truly fascinated by the idea of sending digital data over the analog broadcast signal. “datacasting” was the term we used. Once he finished with interactive TV he had a new idea.
Believe it or not, in the time before widespread broadband, downloading an entire movie could take hours. Media companies were interested in ways to allow digital viewing besides DVDs. At the time, this was a hard problem to solve. “Fast” broadband at the time was a 3 Mb/s DSL line.
We discussed the issue a lot, despite many at Disney wanting the internet to go away.
Scott latched onto the idea of using the NTSC data streams to send movies to a device in the home. The transfer would be quite slow, but with a device listening 24 hours a day, it just might work.
And so Scott began on his quest to make Moviebeam happen.
The concept was caching movies on a box in someone’s home and when they wanted to watch it, they could purchase/rent it and it would unlock to be played. Kind of like a mini Redbox kiosk in your house.
He pitched the idea to the notorious Strategic Planning group at Disney and they greenlit it.
Soon, Scott was on trips to South Korea to coordinate with manufacturers on how to build set-top boxes that could listen to the on-air broadcast, store the data, and playback movies to a TV. I remember him trying to explain how easy it was to learn the Korean alphabet and read Korean.
Believe it or not, it all worked and I remember seeing the boxes in Best Buy. Again, an amazing technical achievement at the time.
Wrap-up
I’m not sure why I felt the need to write this. It’s been sitting in my mind for a while.
Scott was an inspiration to me and I think of him often.
I guess I just wanted more people to know what kind of special person he was and what we lost.
