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This article appeared in the Orange County Register
on September 23, 2003. The red areas show where he mentions his Disneyland
experience.
Video Virtuoso
Musician's 'day job' is designing software for recording cable-TV
programs.
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By JIM FINKLE
The Orange County Register
He's got a tough job.
Denny Hardwick, a Huntington Beach musician-turned-software-engineer, is
one of the guys that Pioneer has put in charge of its efforts to battle
Tivo, the digital video recorder that's changing the way many people watch
television.
Hardwick, 47, is a senior
project manager with Pioneer Digital Technologies Inc., whose software
runs the digital video recorder boxes that Time Warner Cable introduced
this summer in Orange County.
Development of that
software, dubbed Passport Echo, is one of Hardwick's major tasks at
Pioneer, a Burbank subsidiary of the Japanese electronics giant. He ended
up at Pioneer after spending 25 years working as a musician, music
teacher, developer of instructional CD-ROMs, software programmer and Web
designer.
His current job is
rewarding, he says, because the products he's working to perfect could one
day affect the way people watch TV. While he's invisible to TV viewers
whose cable boxes are loaded with Pioneer software,
his face may be familiar to some people because he's been working as a
musician at Disneyland for nearly a quarter century.
The jury's still out on
Passport Echo. The version that Time Warner introduced in July isn't as
easy to use as Tivo and doesn't have as many features. Hardwick promises
that will change as Pioneer updates Passport Echo.
Q. What was your education?
A. In the 1970s I studied music at Indiana University and at the Guitar
Institute of Technology in Hollywood.
In the 1980s, I started an 11-year journey through
college. I was married, working at Disneyland as a
musician and Warner New Media as a software engineer and helping
raise our two kids while going to Fullerton Community College. I received
an AA degree from FCC and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Cal
State Fullerton.
Q. How did you become a software engineer?
A. I moved to California when I was 20 years old to study jazz guitar with
the late, great Joe Pass. I landed a few on-camera talent gigs for movies
and television as a musician and began doing recording-session work for
radio and TV jingles.
I started performing at Disneyland in
1980. I've played acoustic and electric guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin,
bass, and washboard in over 25 bands, shows and parades. I also played at
the Disneyland Hotel for over eight years in Sgt. Preston's Yukon Salon
and Dance Hall. Recently, I've been substituting in the "Billy Hill and
the Hillbillies" show and playing with the "Barn Cats."
I took some computer classes and liked writing computer
programs. I thought that, if nothing else, having a degree in computer
science would be a good background, but I had no idea how it would affect
my life and my music career.
I got an internship at Warner New Media in Burbank in
1990. As I became more proficient at reading and writing software, I was
given more programming tasks and ended up a full-time software engineer,
building software tools that would allow people who were not engineers to
create CD-ROMs. The first of 15 commercially published CD-ROM titles I
worked on was Time Magazine's "Desert Storm."
Q. You've been with Pioneer for 2 1/2 years. What do you do as a
senior project manager?
A. One thing I don't do is write code. Although I work with the
engineering group and discuss software development, I'm smart enough to
know that there are people who are a lot more talented at writing software
than me. At the highest level, my job is to make sure they know what to
build, what to fix and when the product ships.
Q. What projects have you worked on at Pioneer?
A. I have mainly focused on two projects, Video on Demand (VOD) and
Passport Echo, our digital video recorder (DVR) software. These are both
large projects that have taken quite a long time to develop and deploy.
The VOD application extends Passport's schedule-based navigation, which is
used in the Program Guide. Viewers can browse movie and television titles,
make a purchase, and watch the video immediately. Unlike Pay-Per-View
movies, you can fast forward, rewind and pause on-demand videos just as
you would if you were using a DVD. Passport Echo extends the Program Guide
and VOD features by allowing viewers to pause, rewind and fast forward
live video, as well as save shows to an internal hard drive for later
playback. The first version of Passport Echo was commercially deployed
this year and is available in Orange County through Time Warner Cable.
Q: What projects are you currently working on at Pioneer?
A. We've been updating Passport Echo to run on high-definition DVR set-top
boxes, which will be available soon. We're also creating a version of
Passport that will run in Pioneer's new digital cable-ready 50-inch plasma
display. This next-generation media receiver can tune to off-air TV and
digital cable signals without the need for an external set-top box.
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