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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hal Campbell who wrote (7742)	4/22/1999 1:18:00 PM
From: flickerful	Respond to of 17679

how thoroughly perceptive, hal. i think that's very savvy stuff.<eom>

To: Hal Campbell who wrote (7742)	4/22/1999 1:23:00 PM
From: Chris Elsass	Read Replies (13) \| Respond to of 17679

NAB'99 Ampex Subsidiaries Quality People Quality Products Quality Companies Two fellow investors and myself went to NAB'99 to check our company and its subsidiaries, and the competition. We were fortunate enough to meet with Ken Santucci, Dave Gardy and Jeff of TvontheWEb, John Henessay and others of Ampex Data Storage, Howard Gold and Drew Cummings of AENTV, and sales people from MICRONET. We also saw Sony's new PETABYTE tape backup system, talked with a HP Sales representative, visited Techtronix's massive booth, and an overpowering Panasonic flat panel HDTV that we could not get close enough to and tried to get inside it. TvontheWeb The TvontheWeb booth was buzzing with activity. Live webcasts, interviews, music, very nice looking booth and quality people. The excitement is in the air at TvontheWeb, literally, they had a helicopter flying around outside of the convention with a “NARROWCAST with TVontheWeb.com” banner. Ken, Dave and Jeff are all great people and took the time to talk with us. Ken has a great personality and a tremendous amount of energy. It is unbelievable how small of a foot print TvontheWeb requires to do production. The cameras, stage, editing, and production equipment requires less than 450 sq. feet!! Unbelievable. They have been on a hiring binge since they received the Ampex Funds. In January they had 4 employees and are currently in the 30-40 range heading toward 200 by the end of the year. They are very excited about Malta and view it as a window to how Webcasting will be done in the future. They mentioned that they plan on doing more live big production events. This is Tim Swift's specialty and they plan to exploit it. They are starting to promote e-comerce products for sale on their site and showed us a new DVD disk on the Air and Space Channel that uses the web to obtain supplementary information from TVontheWeb while you play it. This is a new product with fabulous opportunities. The ecommerce is still evolving with TvontheWeb and we should see these results gradually. The average TvontheWeb user is there 12 minutes and is accessing three channels. Advertisers really like this “stickiness” but in general the advertisers, other businesses and probably most investors don't really understand web narrowcasting. Part of the reason is because it is new and still evolving. This makes getting advertisers and new channels a little more difficult because they have not seen or do not understand web narrowcasting, but once they do they stay. Apple also was debuting its new quicktime version 4 increasing the competition in the video streaming group. We didn't check it out but it is good news because it gives us more options and more visibility. TvontheWeb has spice and the people are excited about their opportunities. Things are happening and it should be fun to watch it unfold. They are aggressively promoting, growing and getting the news out about themselves and Ampex. This is a great company with great people. You should definitely check out the archives of the interviews this week. Haven't seen them myself but they interviewed several people of interest, including Michael Cooper and Drew Cummings. MICRONET We talked with the marketing coordinator. The had a very nice booth with Genesys set up and Multiple RAID arrays. They were streaming via the fiber optic to 4 sets of TVs. The RAID systems were pretty nice and each individual drive is hot swappable if the need to be worked on. Micronet is going on a 30 city tour with apple to show their products. The tour sounded like it was mainly for apple but micronet should able to get some nice publicity. They have a nice setup and had some nice interest in their booth. AMPEX DATA SYSTEMS Ampex's booth was full of people. Multiple tours were going on with very interested customers, plural. Mostly local TV stations that currently have analog tapes and are planning ahead for the switch to digital. Lots of interest and Lots of business cards changing hands. John Hennesay was giving the tour we were on and he is a great sales person. He was very knowledgeable and knows what the customer's needs are. He was personable and attentive to questions. The booth was also very cool. They had the 812 with plexiglass so you could see the tape transfer and storage. They had 50 GB tapes that the robot would transfer to one of 4 tape drives located on one side of the machine. The tape transfer was fast, clean and very impressive. Ampex emphasis was not only on quality and storage capacity, but also on low failure rate. He also talked about how they prepare the tape before load it into the cassette. The DCR 330 GB tapes are huge, about 1 foot by ½ foot. It takes about 3 1/2 minutes to search a 330 GB tape from front to back. They also had a 712 machine on display with the transfer rail to another machine. It is very impressive to see the machines switch tapes. $390 for the 330GB tape but discount the price for volume orders. Quad Density is coming along just fine. They also had a MICRONET RAID machine at the booth. They have a big advantage in tape partitioning (which is beneficial for inserting segments into programming). Sony does not have this capability. The customers were very interested in this and really seemed to be important to them. Good Booth, Great Products. Great Traffic HP Booth An Ampex 712 tape system was at the HP booth. We talked with a sales member and it boiled down to HP will integrate their system to accommodate the vendors archive systems depending on what the customer wants. He did not mention a preference either way and only mentioned StorageTek as an alternative. SONY Sony has a PETABITE system that was also impressive. They are less expensive than AMPEX, about $179,000 fully loaded. About $140,000 standard. They had a nice setup and used 50GB tapes at $100 each. They also used helical scanning but do not the same type of partitioning available that Ampex does. The sales person we spoke to was not as knowledgeable as Ampex personnel. AENTV Drew Cummings and Howard Gold were around the AMPEX booth and took the time to speak us. Both of them are good people and very interesting to talk with. The 7000 sq. foot production studio is coming along fine. They also are excited about their possibilities and said there will be some more information about them coming out later this year. They met Dave Gardy for the first time at this show and will probably integrate some programming with TvontheWeb later on. It appears that there is so much going on right now that within AMPEX each individual AMPEX subsidiary that they have not had time to look at working together but will soon. They also will be involved in the New York division to some extent. They will be the west coast production and TvontheWeb will the east coast facility. AMPEX CORP Ampex has a lot going on and is running full steam ahead. Their employees (Data System Employees, TvontheWeb, AENTV, and Micronet) have stock and are buying stock. The companies are separate entities and it does not appear as though Ed is telling them what to do. Ed has a plan and is buying companies and working internally to fulfill that plan. Each individual company is solid on its own and all have promising prospects. I am not sure what is going on with the stock in the short term, but in the long term it seems like a quote from Dave Gardy applies "Juggernaut." Brian, Chris and Winston