It all began with a 13″ BW Zenith TV

The best Christmas present Santa ever brought me was a 13″ Zenith black and white television, even though I had asked for a Big Wheel like the rest of my friends. While they made it down hills unscathed on their new toys, I simply tried to not die from the cockpit of my Radio Flyer limited edition wagon from the year before. I’m still reeling from the humiliation of being the only kid using “old technology”. How quickly things change. A year earlier, with all of its potential uses, my wagon was all the rage. I was immediately anointed Master of the neighborhood. When the year of the Big Wheel came around, quite frankly, I was caught off guard. Technology does that. It sometimes catches us off guard. Hauling capacity gave way to sheer speed in the winter of 1973. Little did I know, though, that all those nights spent in my bedroom in front of my new 13″ Zenith plotting my return to neighborhood stardom, would eventually pay off.

My bedroom TV meant freedom. No longer was I constrained to watching TV in the Living Room with my parents. While I was no longer Master of the neighborhood, my TV made me Master of my visual entertainment.

I think about that old TV fondly; wished I never gave it to my girlfriend’s sister when she went off to Law School at Michigan. Today I have a better TV, though. That TV is in my pocket right now; it is my Apple iPhone with the Syncbak app. When I’m done writing this I’m heading down to a casino, where I’ll take my TV. Then I’ll head to the Las Vegas Convention Center, where I’ll take my TV. From there, I don’t know where I’ll head, but I’ll have my TV.

2012, while long thought to be “the end of the world” is really a new beginning at least for TV. Broadcasters should be giddy with anticipation about the future of television. Their viewers will never be without a TV. Let’s give them something to watch folks. If it’s the end of the world, so be it. However, I think it’s just the beginning.

Slings and Arrows

Blogs are a funny thing. I’ve done this one off and on now for more than a decade.  While it has always been jackperry.com, it has at times morphed between talking about my current company to an outlet for talking about things I’ve learned in being a tech entrepreneur since 1989.

You may have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from the blogosphere. But this past Monday night, over a burrito and a beer with my high school buddy, Jarl Brey, I decided to re-engage.

Jarl and I were having a summit, a burrito summit, at our hangout from 30 years ago called the Beltline Bar. Cool place; timeless treasure. Jarl is in the early stages of a venture he calls “Zip the Grand,” a kind of urban renewal, invigoration and extreme sports play in our hometown of Grand Rapids, MI. Jarl’s out in front on this one and I told him that’s the best place to be: “if you want to win, get there first.”

I didn’t tell Jarl about the downside of being first, though: the arrows in your back. I only recently heard it described this way by a broadcaster who congratulated me for being the guy with “all the arrows in his back” with my company, Syncbak. He said that’s what happens to market leaders.

Guys with arrows in their backs don’t hear often enough that they are making a difference. Not that it would make a difference, really. Succeeding at anything new requires good vision and bad hearing so the “it can’t be dones” don’t get through.

I wish my friend, Jarl, all the luck in the world getting his venture off the ground.  But he already has the most important thing – passion. He won’t know he’s close to success, though, until he’s got a few arrows in his back.

Catch up with us at CES 2012 (at Eureka Park, Booth #73108) to see just how close to success we are.  We’re on the verge of taking TV over-the-top.

Patents, Funeral Parlors, Rodeos, and the Future of Television

I intend to make TV personal. When Syncbak is done, you won’t need cable or satellite to package your programming. You’ll do that for yourself – create your own lineup of content that’s right for you and your family. You won’t see ads for products you’ll never ever buy. The ads you see will be appropriate for you and delivered in context of when and where you’re watching, as well as the device used to view that content. You won’t need a physical DVR chained to your living room. Your content, live or on-demand will always be there. The place you choose becomes irrelevant as does the device. Syncbak.TV, the soon to be unveiled consumer facing, won’t care where you watch, what you watch, or what device you want to use – we just want you to watch the content you want to see, where you want to see it, when you can see it. TV is going to be personal.

In the spring of 2009 I figured out how to do that, make TV personal. So powerful was the epiphany that I went into virtual seclusion to write the plan and patents.  I rented a 2^nd story room in an old 1800s funeral parlor for $357/month. I bought used furniture for $100 and a new laptop. I bought a high volume color printer, borrowed a dorm-room refrigerator, and I went to work.  After a couple of months of absolute nose-down research and planning, I overheard my father in-law speculate to my wife (his daughter), that he thought I “must be smoking dope.”

If I had my druthers, Syncbak would still be in stealth mode. Oh, we’ve outgrown the funeral parlor and our machine needs have gone up exponentially, IT always seems to be a major headache and we have bills to pay, but we’re still angling towards the real coming out party that is Syncbak.TV. Personal TV. Your TV.

The press is starting to cover Syncbak. Because this isn’t my first rodeo, getting in sync with the national trades has been pretty easy. We have history. It’s the regionals, equally as important to their readers (hey we believe in local), who are having a harder time trying to tell the story. I even heard tell of one reporter confused about how the broadcast industry local markets work.  At the end of the day, I don’t think a viewer needs to worry about that.  Internet TV just needs to work, for everyone involved.

TV is headed to the clouds, sometimes called over-the-top (OTT), to be streamed to smart devices via the Internet. I believe broadcast television needs to be a part of that. We built the technology to enable that. That issue right now affects 330 million people who cannot point, click and watch TV on the device of their choosing. The Syncbak technology fixes that.

But….that ain’t the rub. The Syncbak technology is about you, the viewer. Deep in the background of the Internet, a place we call Syncbak Central is managing your rights (the content you can watch). It doesn’t care about anything but you. It gets to know you. The Syncbak technology tears down the boundaries of content distribution by eliminating every possible middleman between the content creator (or rights holder) and you. It makes TV personal.

My partners in all of this are, of course, television broadcasters. That said, so too are content owners, advertisers and you, the viewer.

Together, we’re going to make TV personal.

photo by weststudio via flikr

Broadcast Innovation in a Time of Disruption

The question of the day is innovation. Specifically, are broadcasters innovating? Are they innovating fast enough or at all? Do they even need to innovate? After all, each broadcaster has license to serve a specific market with FREE over-air-television and, last I checked, they’re all doing that. The one-to-many broadcast medium, while efficient, doesn’t leave much room for innovation, save mobile broadcasting and it’s too soon to tell how that will play out.
Enter Syncbak. When I started this company it was to solve a specific problem; how to transition over-the-air broadcasting to over-the-web just as it did for both cable and satellite. Two years later, because of the efforts of many broadcasters, the Syncbak technology has morphed into a “Connected Broadcast Platform.”
We believe our Syncbak technology will spur innovation by local broadcasters. The first thing it does is create a 1:1 connection with a viewer over-the-air and at that point, having done that, a broadcaster can deliver anything over-the-top that he has the rights to. He can do so to ANY device the consumer happens to be using, regardless of place or time.

Our Syncbak technology assumes all consumers will eventually have a “connected television” and because of that, with our technology, an innovative broadcaster will offer more content on more devices OTT to each of the viewers they are licensed to reach over-the-air.

Now that’s a win-win situation for investors, consumers & broadcasters…one big happy family.