Thursday, January 08, 2004

JAY LENO: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. You know, I was in Burbank just about 10 or 15 seconds ago and this new instant transporting will be the next feature. I don't want to get people excited, we're still, what, about 8 to 10 weeks away on that. So let's just focus on why we're here today. I was just checking my SPOT watch. I traded my Pulsar in for this baby, it's fabulous. And one feature you didn't mention, Yusuf, if you stand on this it gives you your weight. Did you know that? You put it down, stand on it with both -- just do that, and then it will give you the read out, which is a fantastic thing, certainly.

......
I introduced -- actually Bill and I go back, because we introduced Windows '95 together. What year was that, Bill? (Laughter.)
BILL GATES: We picked the name for the date, it was 1995.
JAY LENO: Yes, '95, right. Back then Bill was doing this computer thing out of his garage, I paid for lunch, he still owes me a $20, but I mean, we'll forget about that. But, who would have guessed back in '95 that this whole computer thing was going to catch on the way it did. It's pretty amazing. Do we have some photos of that? There it is right there. There he is, as you see. My hair was much longer then, a little darker. Bill, your hair looks exactly the same. The glasses are a little smaller. Bill, it's interesting, since Ben Franklin there's been a lot of advances in eyewear, did you know that? They have the Lasik surgery now, they have the contact lenses, have you thought about it?

BILL GATES: No, I haven't.

JAY LENO: Yes, well, you're weaning your way. The glasses are getting smaller, so you might be getting towards contacts, but it's just something to think about.

BILL GATES: OK.

JAY LENO: Just something to think about. And what do we have here, are we going to talk about broadband?

YUSUF MEHDI: Yes, we're going to go ahead and talk about the new MSN Broadband. It's part of the broadband demo, but we'll go ahead and show it to you anyway.

So one of the tough things for people on the Web today is to look at high-quality broadband video. It's very expensive to stream it and so the only way that most people can do it is to pay for a subscription service. We are actually going to offer it for free, in part because of the great Windows Media Series 9 technology that allows you to do high-quality streaming without having to have a fast connection. So here's the new service, we've got the broadband player here, we have the ability to come down and choose from a lot of content.

JAY LENO: What do we have here?

YUSUF MEHDI: Here's some news --

JAY LENO: There's Osama bin Laden. I have a plan to capture Osama bin Laden. We send over Anna Nicole Smith, she'll get his money, he'll be dead in a week. OK, very simple, very easy, that's the American way. (Laughter.)

YUSUF MEHDI: Well, given that, Jay, I thought we should share some entertainment things. So here's some things with entertainment. Let's go ahead and take a look at some clips and show you the quality now. We stream this at 300k, and if you download it, it will actually download and play at 700k, so really high quality. Let's go ahead and take a look at it.

(Video segment.)

JAY LENO: Now, you see the thing that's very cool about that is on the Tonight Show, let's say that somebody has a favorite headline or there's a sketch or something they want to see, rather than watch the show they could just go right -- oh, that's bad. I don't know if I'm as crazy about that as I thought.

YUSUF MEHDI: We have top content from NBC, Showtime, Discovery Channel, Home, Weather Channel, et cetera. It's great content to start out and launch. As of tomorrow everyone can come up to MSN and get this great quality content, and then over time we'll add more and more content.

JAY LENO: Could I watch --

YUSUF MEHDI: That will be a little bit harder to find on the Web. I'm not sure you'll find it on our video service but we'll take a look at it.

So that, Bill, is just a quick sneak peek at some of the key features with MSN Premium, and MSN.com.

Any parting thought, Jay, before we depart?

JAY LENO: Any parting thoughts? No, I saw Martha Stewart there, did you see that today?

YUSUF MEHDI: Yes, I did.

JAY LENO: They found her in a spider hole under a farm in Connecticut today, just for anybody who hadn't gotten the latest news on that.

YUSUF MEHDI: So that's MSN. We're very excited about it. I think it's the biggest release we've had at MSN to date, and I think we're going to satisfy the hundreds of millions of people who use MSN every day.

BILL GATES: Well, thanks, Jay, thanks, Yusuf. (Applause.)

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