Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter (Part 6)

We continue our discussion on Wink, its capabilities, technology, IPO, and subsequent sale. Remember, all this was happening in the pre-broadband, pre-always-on era that we have come to know in the last 5 years.

SM: When you say that you had installations in 30 million households, was that 30 million households subscribed to the services, or were 30 million people actually using the service? MW: This was a free service to those households. It was mainly an advertising supported model, and it was also programming networked supported. What I mean by that is if you are watching the weather channel, with one click on your remote control you can pull up a small bar on the bottom of your screen and actually check your local weather no matter where you live.

It was an instantaneous local access that the weather channel provided on their national feed. Very little bandwidth of the channel space was used; we used on the analog side the vertical blinking interval, on the digital side we used the MPEG stream to really insert this data with very little overhead to the system. It gave great power and capability on screen to the consumer.

On the advertising business model if you were watching a commercial you could, with one click on the remote, buy the product, get a coupon, or get a sample depending on what the advertiser was offering.

SM: How did you handle the transactions in the backend? MW: We had a full data center so we collected all of the transaction in the backed and then we would send the data and information back to either a programming network or an advertiser for fulfillment. The great news was having a partnership with the cable operators, we already had the customer’s phone number and address, so you did not have to key any of the data in on the screen. We also had great information about what customers were watching. We could tell if you were watching a particular program, if you watched the commercials, where in the POD the commercial showed up, what commercial was most viewed and interacted with. It was a great technology.

SM: How big did the company get? MW: We were a public company and at one point we had a $2.5 billion market cap, in the heydays. We sold the company for $300M to Liberty Media, who did a roll up of interactive companies with Open TV and AC TV which were the other two interactive television service companies serving either the cable or the direct broadcast industry in the United States and around the world. Today the Wink capability is part of Open TV.

SM: What year did you go public? MW: We went public in 2000.
SM: When did you sell the company? MW: We sold the company in 2002.
SM: So, after the crash, which explains the valuation erosion.

[to be continued]

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]

This segment is part 6 in the series : Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter
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