After years of waiting, it looks like Comcast and TiVo are almost ready to launch TiVo service for Comcast set top boxes. During TiVo's quarterly earnings call yesterday, CEO Tom Rogers announced that the official launch will be around August.The software is currently in limited trials. But in August, Comcast plans to launch a limited commercial rollout in parts of New England. Rogers says Cox Cable could be ready to offer TiVo software on its set top boxes by the end of the year.
At this point, TiVo is fighting the generic cable company set top box on two fronts. While sales of the $800 TiVo Series3 haven't been spectacular, Tivo is continuing to work on a lower-cost high definition unit. But if selling standalone boxes doesn't work out for the PVR pioneer, it looks like providing software to television providers may be a viable business model.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-31-2007 @ 2:42PM
David said...
TiVo makes its money off of the monthly service fee, not hardware. Even if they only got a portion of the fee Comcast charges for the PVR service, multiplying that by a couple million more than matches the revenue they would lose from potential stand-alone box sales. Their existing DirecTV deal is a good example - a very large protion of TiVo's revenue has traditionally come from extra fees collected by DirecTV for usage of the "DirecTiVo" DVR satellite receiver. With Comcast's 50 million customers, this could potentially be the most lucrative deal TiVo has ever made.
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