TiVo moving towards being a media-services company?
By Nilay Patel 
posted Dec 10th 2007 1:01PM
posted Dec 10th 2007 1:01PM
There's been a definite trend towards service integration at TiVo lately, with quite a string of partnerships to show for it: the company's gotten in bed with Music Choice, Picasa / Photobucket and Nero in the past couple weeks, not to mention the finally-happening Comcast rollout, Amazon Unbox and Rhapsody offerings. On top of that, the company is also finally capitalizing on its vast stores of aggregate viewer data, having entered into a deal with NBC to provide Nielsen-esque ratings data on a second-by-second basis. Given all the wheeling and dealing, it's not at all surprising that CEO Tom Rogers told the New York Times that TiVo has "substantially moved in the direction of becoming a media company," but it's definitely a big shift for the DVR company, which until recently was something of an outsider. That's all changed now, apparently -- according to Rogers, "all the networks" are in talks to land similar ratings deals, and that the company is "aggressively" trying to partner with the media industry. That sounds about right to us -- we haven't mentioned the deathwatch in a while, after all -- but we're just hoping all of this doesn't lead to even more targeted ads.
it was a stupid article. The ratings business is always going to be a small niche. Unbox/Rhapasody/Music Choice/Photobucket is about product differentiation, not revenue. What nobody is talking about is the ad technology they may or may have developed with Comcast -- if you can add/remove/edit adits in programs that are saved, then they have a real interesting little gizmo. Given that the Tivo cost on Comcast is looking like 2.95 retail, that can't be a lot per sub for Tivo -- less than the DirecTV deal -- but a ad-revenue deal could add to that.
Tivo can be a drastically better ratings indicator than Nielsen. Especially when they can tell what ads you do or don't watch.
I agree with charlie. TiVo's PR firm is earning their fees.
I'm interested to see what happens with TiVo's deal with Comcast as well, but it is taking *forever* to roll out. In their latest earnings call, they still wouldn't state that it was on any actual customers home cable boxes in the Boston area, just Comcast employees.