"Ask me what 9 times F is. It's fleventyfive."

****ing ROFL

That was very very good. Should be a fun season.

I agree. This show was pretty good. I'm looking forward to next week's episode.

I'm excited about this show. It totally delivered.

No unlikable characters so far. Mike Judge

enjoyable pilot

That was really awesome. The no college VC is hilarious and the convo about which Steve was perfect.

I thought the doctor with a startup idea was pitch perfect. Reminds me of how everyone in LA is somehow plotting their entry into showbiz.

I loved that pitch scene

Came in cold watching this show since I haven't even seen the trailer. I liked it a lot, can't wait until next week

I loved the pitch scene as well.

I liked the realistic conflict the show portrayed in such a zany universe (anti-college guy was A+ as stated above). Isn't the product kind of insane, though? From what I thought I understood, it would seem that it was saying that you could essentially get a high quality broadcast .wav music file down to 1.5MB for the internet. I'm pretty sure that would be a Holy Grail for people like me, but it didn't detract from the experience, especially if it makes people work toward that goal in real life.

This had me cracking up.

I enjoyed this premiere. The characters I found much more likable than those on "Betas" which is a somewhat similar show. A good example would be when at the end they're juggling the ball and chanting for blue over and over. That just felt like such a realistic moment. Hard to explain, but, despite spending very little time with the characters individually in the episode, a moment like that really endears the characters to me.

Two big thumbs up IMO.

Yeah I didn't buy that because, as far as I know, it's technologically impossible and they didn't do much to explain it. Apparently some writers think that the word 'algorithm' can magically solve plot issues like that. We saw it on Suits a couple of weeks ago as well (although there at least it wasn't professing to do something impossible). Given that it's the premise of the show, however, it doesn't really matter and I think the rest of it was just believable enough to make some of the silly jokes (like 'Ask me what 9 times f is.') funny.

The startup is pitch perfect for the show. Its boring and unsexy but would completely revolutionise anything digital. Netflix could use a fraction of its bandwidth to stream 4k, browsing the internet would be faster because pages would be smaller and you could transfer massive data files in a really small footprint all in a compressed format that doesnt need to be expanded to be useful. Is it possible, I have no idea, but its the awesome hundred billion dollar (literally) idea that someone could underestimate to start with.

BTW the "zany universe" is actually by all accounts real. The no college VC is based on a real VC and the no college stuff is a real movement in the valley. Eric Schmidt (the real Google exec chairman) agreed to a cameo in the party because he "had been to those parties before". The idea of everyone pitching ideas to everyone who might have influence or money is real and the line about how Pied Piper was pitched as "the google of all music" is completely how startups talk with "uber of planes" or the "airbnb of dog hotels" being actual startups.

By all accounts they actually have managed to capture the essence of Silicon Valley and the current tech startups. Even the fact that the show has just one female in the entire pilot is a pretty representative ratio, lol.

Yeah, looks better than beta's. Looking forward to the rest of the season.

Yeah, everything feels pretty authentic so far (tech side of stuff anyway + the personalities, I've never worked at a startup).

Episode 1 is on YouTube

My wife's worked at several startups (I worked at one), and I don't think she really had an opinion about how realistic it was. It's really hard to categorize what the show is. I don't think it's a comedy (though it has funny moments), and I don't think it's a parody (though it's lampooning the place), but it's not really a drama either. So, hmm.

At the start up I worked at (what should have ended up being the biggest internet radio station), I remember a particularly "funny" story about me trying to improve something. This company was slightly ahead of its time (meaning the current technology wasn't ready for it), maybe 2 or 3 years, and was trying to push the envelope with music programming and interaction with DJs (featured live video at all times). I was a sound engineer for them, and at the time very few people had DSL or Cable. So that meant that most listeners were on dial up. They had 4 feeds you could basically select based on your connection. The first was 28k, the second was 56k, the third was 100k, and the fourth was 300k. At 28k, you would get something like 4 frames per second rough quality video, and the sound was like a flushing toilet. At 56k, the video was a little better, and the flushing toilet sound wasn't as prominent. At 100k, the video looked good, but there were some compression artifacts on the music. At 300k, the video was as good as it could look, and the audio had no noticeable compression artifacts. However, this was appealing to a very small audience.

Most people who went to the site were on 56k modems, and I spent a lot of time secretly tweaking the "algorithm" (lol) to where I felt the audio was pretty good quality, and the video was affected as little as possible. But where I did my really good work was on the 28k feed (where there was definitely still some audience). I managed to get rid of the entire toilet flush effect and you could still see a low frame rate video, that was poor quality. I sent out an email speaking of the changes, got praised by the CEO, and ripped by the tech guy (who put it back). Needless to say, the company ended up failing after about a year because they decided to put all their focus in idiotic video, and didn't give a crap about the sound quality of an internet RADIO station. Startup ideology is often fun.

For something like the product in Silicon Valley, would they just be licensing the technology?

Assuming the compression technique were real Google would just walk along and buy it tomorrow for something super ridiculous like up to 50 billion dollars* so it is kinda academic how it would work "in real life". But if you wanted to build an independent company it would be a patent and they would license the patent I guess.

This is kinda the problem with the show as it develops, this idea if you can move it beyond proof of concept to a scalable product you wouldnt need offices or a team of programmers. You would just need a huge legal team to protect the IP and the business would form around it by licensing the technique to other tech firms. Its like how Microsoft makes more money from licensing its IP on Android phones than its Windows Phones that it makes just on a more massive scale.

But yeah, in reality a company or a team of companies would band together for the technology, compressing data is super duper valuable.

* in a world where Whatsapp is worth 19, 50 billion as a mix of cash and stock as crazy massive as it is would be a bargain given how Google would instantly scale it across youtube, drive, play music and the play store

HD content is approximately 1GB per minute. I think the algorithm was intended to compress the size of high quality stuff to around 1/30th the size, if we're basing it on a typical song being about 45MB for a 24 Bit 44.1kHz .wav file. Storage needs would literally change overnight. As quality increases, size increases astronomically, but storage has become ridiculously cheap to handle that (I remember when we got our first 1TB hard drive, and how excited we were about that, despite it costing $5k at the time, and now a 3TB drive that can playback professional audio at the speeds it needs to is around $250). I really look forward to a world where this idea is actually possible and practical cost wise for consumers and small businesses.

I think that is the crux of the issue with the show. Why do they need a team? Isn't it already made, and it would just be about how the various companies would want to use the license the owners would grant? Your team of lawyers and trying to figure out how to protect the patent would probably be a big part of how this idea would play out in real life.

That really leads to the next questions in the thread. If you were Richard (everyone), would you have sold to Hooli or would you have wanted to keep the company, and why?

I loved it. Doctor scene was epic. Cast is awesome; I love the Indian guy, his cameos on Portlandia are always hilarious.

We have approximately four posts to make sure this threads isn't AIDS by page 2

Wat. It's 100% a comedy.

Yeah seriously enough with the encryption talk. We know it's not realistic otherwise someone would have done it already. Who cares.

Uh, okay. Not sure how you come to that conclusion, but whatever. It's not 100% anything.