Audio Video News

TiVo Making Headlines: First, The Good News


Already recognized as a household name, TiVo continues to make news on a practically daily basis, for good and for ill. Starting with the good news, TiVo announced a new spate of Internet powered features for subscribers with a Series 2 DVR connected to a home network, including the ability to share photos, check traffic and weather, listen to podcasts and Internet radio, and even buy movie tickets online right from your television.

Much of the new TiVo connectivity is powered through services provided by Yahoo!. The powerful and popular Yahoo! Photos application enables photo sharing, the podcasts are served from Yahoo!’s podcast site, and the traffic and weather info stream from Yahoo! Traffic and Weather, respectively.

TiVo’s Internet radio connects to Live365, an Internet radio network with hundreds of stations from around the world covering a broad variety of genres and categories. The online movie purchasing engine is none other than Fandango of the clever (or annoying, depending on your perspective) bag puppet advertisements. Series 2 TiVo subscribers will be able to check theater listings and show times and buy tickets through their TV.

This follows the announcement that TiVo is testing new features that will allow its Series 2 subscribers to download recorded shows to video iPods, as reported in an earlier UAV news story, and a search feature that will allow users to search for specific commercials and view them on-demand. All these enhancements are free to Series 2 subscribers and the subscription rate is typically around $13 per month.

In spite of these powerful new features, TiVo continues to lose money. Third quarter losses were described as having “narrowed” to $14.2 million in spite of revenues that rose from the same period last year. TiVo gained over 400,000 new subscribers in the third quarter of ’05 and now has over four million total subscribers, but shares fell with the news that the company expects fourth quarter revenue to fall and anticipates a loss of $17-$22 million.

The anticipated losses are expected in part because TiVo will be increasing sales and marketing efforts in the face of stiff competition. Cable companies have been stepping up to the plate and offering their customers non-TiVo DVRs and services. Further, rebates dropped the cost of TiVo’s new boxes to as low as $50, and the bulk of new subscribers in the third quarter were through DirecTV, not from consumers buying TiVo’s standalone DVRs. And according to reports, DirecTV’s promotion practically gave the DVRs away.

Cable Rates To Rise In 2006


Led by the two biggest cable companies in the US, Comcast and Time-Warner, cable companies across the country will be raising rates next year. Rising programming costs and the need to continually invest in new products and services were cited as reasons that rates must go up.

It’s estimated that just about all of Comcast’s 21 million subscribers will see bigger bills, with the charge led by a 6% increase in the “expanded basic” package from which all of its digital (and thus high definition) packages are built from.

Estimates are that Time-Warner Cable serves as many as 11 million customers in 27 states, and that the company’s “expanded basic” package will rise an average of 3.1%. 80% of Cox Communications’ six million plus subscribers already saw rate hikes in 2005, but it’s expected that several markets will see higher rates again in 2006.

Increasing competition from satellite and even telephone companies (telcos) appears to present a double-edged sword to cable operators. On one hand, industry analysts say cable companies have kept rates down for the last couple of years in order to compete with DirecTV and DISH Network, and the burgeoning telco offerings, which offer high-speed internet and digital television services as a package. On the other hand, raising rates figures to only help cable’s competitors moving forward. Although it should be noted that satellite companies and telcos will also be affected by rising programming costs.