Denny Hardwick

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.