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cheema33HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s

Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information. Long story short, the whole project got shut down and about 200 people working on project lost their jobs. Myself included. Luckily I quickly landed at a better place working on more meaningful things.

Original discussionFounder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan346 source comments · at import
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TV
tverbeureHN

Back in the nineties, Philips was days away from signing a licensing deal for a revolutionary video compression technology that compressed whole movies down to 8KB. The former Philips CTO was a strong believer. And then the inventor died and nothing ever came of it. To be a fly on the wall during due diligence meetings between Philips engineers and management. https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-man-who-was-paid-e113000-for-...

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LU
lumostHN

Was the scam that the codec had the raw video in it, so the "files" could be made trivially small?

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NE
neilvHN

> I reported the findings to my manager [...] the whole project got shut down and about 200 people working on project lost their jobs. Myself included. Good for you for reporting the threat. But I'm a little surprised that they let the messenger get killed along with all the other innocents. I knew someone who whistleblew to C-suite, about misrepresentations they realized, on something that was then an existential threat to one of the top companies in its market. A series of layoffs and (IIUC) some M&A later, most of the employees were gone, but that one middle-aged engineer who warned C-suite (averting an even worse fate for the company) escaped all the layoffs, and was still there.

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BO
boldlyboldHN

Between this and the other compression scams mentioned in the thread, is there any connection to the show Silicon Valley? I haven’t heard of this genre of scam before but it sounds a lot like the premise of pied piper!

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LE
lelanthranHN

> I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information. What did you find? Low bitrates? Smaller resolutions? Enquiring minds want to know.

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