A TV-repair man working for over 20 years as a recluse in his attic. When his invention was ready for demo's, Roel Pieper was one of the first to take a look at it. He almost fell out of his chair and said "This is it!" when the device showed 16 movies running at different speeds. He quit his job at Philips later that week to form a company around the invention of Sloot.
Had Jan Sloot really found a new and novel way to store information, beating Shannon's law? Vector graphics? Pre-storing the code book? Or was that only the hook to get as much investors behind it and make a few really really rich?
I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. As a TV-repair man he had to buy the schematics for the TV's he was working on. These schematics came on a CD or floppy disk. Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form. To "unlock" a schematic, one could call a phone number and receive a small keycode that one would enter. This would remove all the hassle of individual data carriers like CD's and floppies, which was a huge market at the time.
I believe the Sloot Digital Coding System was to be a setup-box for media and software. A commercial PirateBay of sorts. You would download (or bring in your device to a local shop) encrypted versions of the latest software and movies. Then you could simply call a number or buy a chip card to unlock a movie you wanted to see. A CD-I Netflix 10 years before Netflix.
This would have made the DVD market redundant. Like a Dolby Surround chip build into all sorts of electronics, so would this technology be licensed to other manufacturers.
The only (and very big) problem was that Jan Sloot did not get to really finish his update-code. How to efficiently and automatically update the database of these devices? A team could have probably worked around it, but Jan Sloot kept to himself and was enormously paranoid. He did not allow Faraday cage tests to rule out suitcase transmitters. He claimed they could be used to reverse engineer his simple invention.
The source-code for the device was never found. In the locker that PI's expected it to be, they found a John Grisham novel, and the only device ever opened after Sloot's death, contained a simple harddrive.
Jan Sloot's attic room was cleaned the day after he died. All his papers, chips and devices were taken. The widow of Jan Sloot and her son have no clue were it went.