1996

Bell Atlantic Video Systems

Bell Atlantic Video Services

After applying for and interviewing at several places I had two job offers and decided on working for Bell Atlantic Video Services. Bell Atlantic was one of the seven regional Bells after the breakup of the Bell System in 1982 and was my telephone provider in Reston. I also had worked for another Bell company, Cincinnati Bell when I worked for their Federal division. At the time of the Bell breakup, Cincinnati Bell operated independently and thus was not affected by the breakup. Info popup

The job at Bell Atlantic Video was quite interesting. At this time Bell Atlantic was concerned about the TV cable companies offering telephone services and they thought they could compete by getting into the TV business.  Bell Atlantic had the concept of "fiber to the home" concept and had developed a plan to roll it out to major cities in the east coast but was projected to be a year or two away (as it turns out much longer).  When I joined, Bell Atlantic had a trial service called "Stargazer" which delivered video-on-demand and TV programs to a 1,000 homes in Reston using DSL over conventional phone lines.  Bell Atlantic also had a trial service using small rooftop microwave dishes to deliver video with the first trial market in Virginia Beach, but microwave had the drawback of requiring dishes on the houses to be in direct line of sight of the transmitter tower. The trial had several hundred homes, and everything was all complete to launch in a few months when they shut the entire service and project down.  Fiber optic to the home was the ultimate solution.

Bell Atlantic Video was based in a building in Reston only a few minutes from where I lived. It was nice to be living and working in Reston again.  The building had been previously owned by Perot Systems.  Everyone had heard of Ross Perot at the time as he ran for President in 1992. On May 25, 1992, he was featured on the cover of Time with the title "Waiting for Perot", an allusion to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. In the election, Perot received 18.9% of the popular vote, about 19,741,065 votes, but no electoral college votes, making him one of the most successful non-major-party presidential candidates. One leftover from Perot Systems owning the building was main cook in the cafeteria was brought there from Texas by Perot himself (or so the rumor went).  Bell Atlantic subsided the lunch for employes, we could get a great lunch for about $5.  I always looked forward to when they served barbeque ribs.

My role in the project was to implement the "near" video on demand service.  The server and storage technology at the time was not ready for true video on demand so they had what they called near video on demand with "near" being that the user could select from shows that started every 30 minutes.  TV shows and movies were stored and streamed from a video server based on Silicon Graphics (SGI) computers. 

My "Lighting the Way" Silicon Graphics Shirt

Working for Bell Atlantic Video was really a fun job.  We were developing a state-of-the-art product which would change the way people receive TV and movies.  The group was a really great bunch of guys consisting of some old "Bell heads", as the old time Bell Atlantic guys were called, and many new young guys like myself.  Silicon Graphics computers were expensive so before we spent several hundred thousand dollars on one, my boss and I flew out to visit Silicon Graphics at their Mountain View, California facility where we got to see their latest video server development.  It was a great trip, Mountain View is in what was known as Silicon Valley in which many high-tech business of the day were located.  It was a great trip, the SGI sales staff treated us like royalty, gourmet catered lunch and taking us out to an expensive restaurant for dinner. Before leaving they gave me a really nice polo shirt.

PreVue Disk for TV shows 4/18/97 Thru 4/30/97
My reflection on the disk

Another company we visited was Sneak Preview which provided scrolling channel guides for cable and satellite providers. Sneak Prevue used an Amiga 2000 computer that hooked into a cable company’s headend to provide the channel listings which were distributed weekly to the cable companies on 12 inch lazerdiscs. 

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