Setting Sail From Hawaii to Denver
By Staff -- Multichannel News, 10/7/2007 8:00:00 PM
Jim Chiddix’s circuitous route to the cable industry ran from Cornell University, where he earned an electrical engineering degree, to the Hawaiian islands to serve on the crew of a sailboat, is a classic tale of entrepreneurism, innovation and lots of curiosity.
Considered the father of hybrid-fiber-coaxial technology, Chiddix’s introduction to cable was out of necessity. He needed a real job, and his ability and passion for making things work led him in 1971 to a cable company on the island of Oahu.
“I went to Honolulu to work on a sailboat but had to get a real job, so I joined a small, rural cable company fixing things. That was my first step into cable, which I didn’t know very much about,” Chiddix said.
He knew enough about technology and fixing things to quickly become the company’s chief technician, and two years later, he was managing the company.
Yet Chiddix’s cable career, which would span more than 35 years, would soon take another tack.
'ONE BIG DISH’
“A friend of mine and I developed a manufacturing business on the side to automate video tape machines. Soon after, the little operators on Oahu joined to build one big dish. That was a big deal — live television from the mainland. It was pretty revolutionary and magical to build a satellite dish in the middle of the ocean,” Chiddix recalled.
The system, which would eventually become Oceanic Cable (now a Time Warner Cable system) and evolve into, arguably, the most progressive system in the country. Cable, Chiddix said, had by now piqued his interest.
“I loved Hawaii — the people, the culture, the sun. And I grew to love cable,” he said. “I’ve always been fascinated with how things work. Not just how technology works, but the business side of the technology, and its value. Cable was about technology, business and value. I was very fortunate to be around people who knew that.”
One of those people was Bob Miron, chairman and CEO of Advance/Newhouse Communications. Miron was an early supporter, and admirer, of Chiddix.
“Jim has always had a unique way of explaining technology to people. He’s made us all a lot smarter,” Miron said. “And I’ve always respected his common sense, engineering ability and sensible ways to get things done. He’s also shown great vision and understanding about where the industry needed to go and how it could get there.”
Chiddix spent 15 years in Hawaii and says he had assumed he’d spend his entire career there. But fate intervened.
“I met my future wife on a trip to the mainland, and Oceanic had been acquired by ATC [American Television & Communications],” he said. “I was now part of a big MSO, and I was pretty apprehensive. But they left us alone and Oceanic became the template to decentralization.”
His days on Oahu were now numbered; ATC asked him to come to Denver and assemble a team to work with fiber, which at the time was an intriguing technology Chiddix had successfully deployed at Oceanic.
“Applying fiber optics to cable has been very satisfying,” he said. “Engineers want to build things that are useful, like bridges or power lines. But people hadn’t found a useful purpose for fiber. When we ran fiber through a tunnel on a mountain on Oahu, it worked really well, and never failed. That’s when I really started thinking about fiber, and became very intrigued with the technology.”
Yet getting fiber into the hands of the cable industry and extolling its benefits was a challenge requiring some salesmanship.
“I showed the [National Cable & Telecommunications Association] engineering committee a fiber link hooked to coaxial cable, and a way to reconfigure cable systems,” Chiddix recalled. “It changed the topology of the systems and was more practical for cable. It fundamentally changed the architecture.”
It changed not only a cable system’s architecture, but an entire industry, said Mike Hayashi, senior vice president of advanced engineering and technology for Time Warner Cable and a member of Chiddix’s team during the formative years of hybrid-fiber-coax technology.
“When he went to ATC engineering, he had a small lab, and his team invented HFC, which transformed the cable industry,” Hayashi said. “Without it, there would be no [video on demand], [voice over Internet protocol] or high-speed Internet.
“Jim gave us the task of making these commercially viable, at one-tenth the price,” Hayashi continued. “That was Pegasus. And HFC remains very robust after 20 years. A lot of innovations [came] out of TWC during his tenure.”
One of those innovations was the Time Warner division Mystro TV, which developed and field-tested the world’s first server-based television program time-shifting service. It led to Time Warner features such as “Start Over” and “Look Back.” But technology for technology’s sake was never Chiddix’s mindset. His agenda has always been about exploring and deploying technology with an eye toward the business.
“We can’t forget about what makes the technology tick, and that is the business side,” he said. “It’s how the technology fits into the business, pragmatically.”
Chiddix went on to head up OpenTV, which needed a CEO and was looking for inroads into the U.S. cable business, Chiddix said. “It was a software company with a big reach.”
Not surprisingly, OpenTV got bigger under Chiddix’s guidance, growing its revenues from $63 million in 2003 to more than $100 million in 2006, and achieving profitability for the first time.
IN THE VANGUARD
Chiddix’s work on HFC earned him and his engineering team an Emmy Award in 1994 for their visionary work on the HFC architecture, which has become the standard for cable systems. He has also been awarded numerous honors, including the prestigious Vanguard Award and President’s Award for his advancement of fiber optics technology.
Chiddix joined the board of Vyyo, a manufacturer of extended-bandwidth cable TV transmission equipment, where he also serves as vice chairman. He also serves on the board of Symmetricom, a maker of precision-timing technologies for telecommunications and scientific uses.
As a technologist, Chiddix sees his induction into the Hall of Fame as the ultimate honor.
“I’m struck by the contrast of cable’s early days and today. It was financially on the edge with little or no credit rating, and was incredibly frugal. But companies that were thrifty are leaders today,” he said. “Contrast that with today’s access to capital and enormous cash flow and it’s a different business. I’m just delighted [that] someone with roots in engineering [is being] recognized.”
No related content found.
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
