Hauswirth wasn't the only one being taken by Stanley's charm, good manners and Christian piety. Shortly after his arrival in San Juan Capistrano, Stanley and his wife began attending church at the South Coast Christian Assembly. In only a few weeks, he was playing piano during services and teaching Bible studies.
Some of his Restec customers who had ties to the church eventually asked Stanley if there was a way to replay races at the local horse track over a computer so that people in other locations could place bets. Stanley told them their inquiry had caused him to stumble on a totally new way of playing high-quality video over everyday computers. Excited by the news, Hauswirth and two customers gave Stanley money to help him move into a modest hotel. By the middle of 1997, Stanley, Hauswirth and two associates founded Digital Motion Video.
Pulling video off a television and turning it into a file that can be played over a computer is no small feat, and this was even more true in 1997. The amount of information carried in the typical video is so vast that it would take a day or more to download a 30-minute sitcom, even with a super-fast broadband Internet connection. Computer scientists have learned to work around this problem by mathematically "compressing" the video in order to produce significantly smaller file sizes. The compression, however, comes at a price: The smaller the file, the smaller the picture, and the more jerky the movement and grainy the picture.
But in less than a year's time, Digital Motion had come up with video that seemed on the cutting edge. Unlike software that Apple Computer and Microsoft were marketing at the time, Digital Motion's software produced images that took up a computer's entire monitor and could be refreshed 30 times every second, giving the video the same size and fluidity it would have on television.
The magician who performed this feat was Digital Motion cofounder and president Robert Dunning, a former marketing manager at high-end computer manufacturer GST-Micro City in Southern California. Dunning used highly specialized hardware and software, much of it still in the testing phase, designed by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based FutureTel and other niche companies in the graphics and publishing industries. Dunning's achievement, according to Dunning, Hauswirth and the third Digital Motion partner, was in assembling off-the-shelf components in a way no one else had done before to produce high-quality video. Soon enough, Stanley would hijack Dunning's work, wrongly calling it proprietary technology that Stanley himself had developed.
Digital Motion would soon dissolve, and to this day the four business partners disagree over who is to blame for the failure. Stanley's three business partners, however, all remain adamant that he used his easygoing charm to talk them out of their money and time. They say he also deliberately sabotaged deals that could have gotten the company off the ground. "He's slick," says Hauswirth, who claims that Stanley still owes him more than $60,000. "All of these transactions were based on friendship and a handshake. I just fell under his spell."
Stanley, however, denies that he wronged anyone at Digital Motion, and pins the blame for the company's woes on others. Stanley was able to assuage Hauswirth's anger over the collapse of Digital Motion, he says, by going out of his way to later secure a job at Pixelon for Hauswirth. Hauswirth was laid off once Pixelon hit hard times.
Within weeks of Digital Motion's breakup, Stanley was showing off Dunning's technology to a fresh crop of unsuspecting associates. This time, according to the former Digital Motion partners, he claimed he was a mathematician and computer programmer who had developed the device using a series of technologies he had designed himself. Stanley remains adamant that he was the one who discovered the technology while living out of his car. "I knew I was on the frontier of a totally new area and I got real, real, real excited," he says.
Soon Stanley was pitching his plan to launch a 1,000-channel Internet broadcasting empire that would rival anything that CBS or Disney could ever build. San Juan Capistrano proved the perfect base. Populated by an ample supply of affluent people who recognized the tremendous investment opportunities offered by the Internet, it was close enough to Los Angeles and Silicon Valley to attract talented employees and business partners - but far enough to escape any careful scrutiny.
Fenne's first crop of takers included a psychologist, the owner of a tile company, a local insurance agent and a marketing manager from Procter & Gamble. Each of them invested between $50,000 and $125,000 in the business. Paul Ward, a lawyer who owned a local insurance company, donated legal services in exchange for a small piece of the company. And thus was born Future Link Communications, later renamed Pixelon.
