Kenneth Potashner pinned the future of his company on a nifty device called ReplayTV. An ad zapper's delight, it looks like a VCR but enables viewers to save 320 hours of TV programming on a hard drive. If a viewer in the U.S. wants to watch every New York Yankee baseball game in the next two weeks, he would type "Yankee" into an on-screen menu that's downloaded daily over a phone line; the machine automatically records each game. The viewer can then send the games in their entirety to 15 friends. The equipment edits out commercials by detecting the black screen between shows and advertisements. Horrors! There goes $50 billion a year in television ad revenue, if the device catches on.
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