Inventor of Internet TV. Media and Movie entrepreneur, Author
The Man Who
Saw the Future
From Industrial Tycoon to the Inventor of Internet TV. Now revealing the ultimate mystery in Mr. Internet TV.
Featured In Legacy Archives
The Golden Era
1953 — 2006
John Bentley Inventor of Internet TV • Media & Movie Entrepreneur • Author
John Bentley was the first to show Internet television in action to the world at Comdex in 1995 and at the Las Vegas CES in 1996. His company Viewcall demonstrated streaming video linked directly to Internet websites using a standard dial-up phone line at a time its revolutionary results were not even an industry conception.
As a tribute to its success at Comdex Bob Metcalfe, winner of the Turing prize for his invention of the Ethernet, was to fully document the demonstration on the spot in the InfoWorld Journal, describing Viewcall as the world’s first and only Internet TV product, noting its simplicity for ordinary users browsing information and purchasing online. Contemporary coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Times, and Byte Magazine further confirmed Viewcall’s first-to-market position.
Constant innovation has shaped more than Bentley’s career — it has shaped his life. Across decades, his work has ranged across media and communications, disrupting ad agencies and billboard industry concepts to creating home movie systems, early word processors, point-to-point facsimile, mobile gaming products and mass marketing of video rental. Again and again, he found himself building what did not yet have a category.
The costly collapse of Viewcall in a long battle with the giants of the PC world — after its pioneering designs later appeared in competing systems — marked a turning point. It required reinvention not only as an entrepreneur, but as a man. Success and failure carried consequences for family, relationships, ambition and self-identity, in which Bentley turned to writing and authorship in retirement.
In his memoir, Mr Internet TV: The Ego and the Id, Bentley reflects candidly on the exhilaration of being first, the vulnerability of being early, and the resilience required to begin again. His story speaks to inventors and entrepreneurs — and to anyone who has pursued an idea ahead of its time.
Now 86, he writes not to dramatize the past, but to ensure that the historical record is accurate and that the human story behind technological change is not forgotten.
"Behind every invention stands a life."
"John Bentley’s Mr. Internet TV is a fun, thrilling, and thoughtful memoir... A 5-star Literary Titan Gold Award Winner."
— Jamie Michele, Readers' Favorite
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Review by Jamie Michele
Mr Internet TV: The Ego and the Id by John Bentley follows his life after his father's passing, working in London and then Australia, before returning home via an adventurous route and using inheritance money to kickstart his real life. Bentley increases his wealth through acquiring and managing companies, eventually founding Barclay Securities. He expands into film production by taking over British Lion Films, dipping his toes into box offices, government, union, and financial matters. Later, he launches Intervision and many other ventures. His personal life is as robust as his businesses: a string of relationships, marriages, and divorces, extensive travel, and some serious high-society circles. Bentley gets into the tech bug and boom, and does some busting, ultimately settling down with wife Janet and writing about historical mysteries, all at his leisure.
John Bentley’s Mr Internet TV: The Ego and the Id reads less like a conventional memoir and more like an expansive portrait of a life shaped by ambition, adventure, and social curiosity. Bentley moves comfortably between the Scottish Highlands and the Côte d’Azur, from business boardrooms to yacht decks in the Caribbean. I had the most fun reading about his frequent elbow rubs with public figures, entrepreneurs, and socialites, and he does so with a keen observational eye. The business ventures are vast, with pop-culture icons like Blockbuster. I say that with half a chuckle, but the fact is that Bentley has done so darn much that some of this reads like a script. There's even a 12-hour wife named Kitty! The writing is straightforward, and the memoir will appeal to readers who enjoy seeing the rhythms of a distinctive career, the ups and downs of fortune, and the ways ambition, opportunity, and circumstance come together over decades. Very highly recommended.
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