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Gold/Mining/Energy : Tri-Vision & The V-Chip -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rob M who wrote (3396)	7/13/1998 10:34:00 AM
From: fewbucks26	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5743

Matchbox and Rob M. On the surface, the recent resignation of the long-time CFO, and more recently the (head?) engineering guy may be concerning. My experience suggests the contrary. Prior to V-Gis, TVL has been a very small company. The skill sets needed (and the ability of a company to pay for them) is limited. Often the promise of the golden goose is what attracts people to "start-ups". In the case of TVL's CFO, clearly the poor performance of the latest financing was a factor in his departure. I spoke with the guy personally sevearl months ago and was unimpressed (I am a finance person myself), so I was encouraged by his departure. While I have not spoken with the engineerning person who left, it could well be a similar situation, i.e., TVL is potentially moving into a different stage of it's evolution and needs more horsepower in these areas. The best way to get it is to go out and "buy" it. Did you notice that the engineering person is still involved with TVL? And the capacity? Basically "business development". This suggests to me that the person still has something to contribute, but is being taken out of the heavy action. That is reality and I'm glad TVL is recognizing this and doing something about it. As far as public awareness of V-Gis, everything I've seen suggests that TVL has been waiting for all broadcasters to beging encoding. Personally I thought this was smart so as not to confuse the consumer. PG has decided that being able to say "we were first" is more important. There is a very real risk though that PG could taint the rest of the v-chip market if the consumer is led to believe that they can block all broadcasters (when they currently can't). Was TVL caught off guard? I don't think so. I think they simply didn't want to take the chance of V-Gis being tainted by releasing the product to early. In addition, that may also explain why you have not seen more advertising yet. You have to burn those ad dollars wisely since the consumer tends to forget quickly. That said, they can't wait too long, since they want consumer awareness to be high as people start gearing up for the holiday selling season. It will be interesting to see what PG is able to come up with in the way of ad dollars. Hard to know since the company is closely held. Finally, I was interested in the PG web site and the description of their decoders. The description makes it sound as if the decoders will function in two "modes". One as an all out block of all programming exceeding a predetermined limit, and second as a filter for program content WITHIN a program, i.e, block out the audio but allow the video (who would want this?) and/or block out particular words if they are used in the dialogue (again, who would want this?). No mention of any "dynamic" capabilities, or whether the box can only handle one set of ratings and what happens if/when they change. Have you looked through PG's website? What were your impressions of the product descriptions.