One has to feel bad for TiVo: they came up with the idea for digital video recorder. Michael Lewis, the best selling author of New New Thing even wrote a long piece about the company. And yet they are not the big winner, despite having one of the better devices on the market, that is booming market according to the findings of a survey conducted by Leichtman Research Group (LRG.)
LRG says that one in every five households in the United States now have a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) – up from about one in every thirteen households just two years ago. Of course most of the DVR owners didn’t really pay for it, and instead got it as “part of a package” from their cable companies or satellite television companies.
“Fueled by a continued push from cable and DBS providers offering combination HD/DVR set-top boxes, LRG forecasts that the number of US households with DVRs will grow to over 60 million by the end of 2011,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG. Interestingly, LRG estimates that 95% of all TV viewing in the US is still of live TV.
LRG says that the DVR owners are richer – mean household income of DVR owners is 33% above average. That kind of makes sense, because above average income households means that folks are working long hours and need a DVR to save and catch up on their television.
Nearly 53% of DVR owners say that they have an HDTV set, while 45% of DVR owners record five or fewer programs per week, LRG says in a press release. These findings are based on a survey of 1,300 households and are part of LRG’s study, On-Demand TV 2007: A Nationwide Study on VOD and DVRs.
The fact that Tivo is not the winner in the early mass market it totally normal, very few pioneers are. The market at this stages demands the cheapest option even if the features/design have to be compromised (think Mac vs. PC). Tivo’s goal is to stick it out.. once people become exposed to the functionality, they will become more discerning and assuming the switching costs are fairly low, people will switch. Tivo’s got it’s work cut out for them, but this is not a surprise, neither is it a failure on their part.
I would be thrilled if Comcast offered the TiVo interface (although maybe not enough to pay much extra for it…) instead of their own clunking mess.
HD DVR? Must have.
HD DVR from TiVo? Way too spendy.
Yeah, we can’t count Tivo out yet. These types of numbers get published all the time what Jupiter Research says vs. another company always vary greatly. They’re about as accurate as Nielsen.
Tivo’s technology is much better than the MSO branded DVRs. We may very well see the end of the Tivo box in the next few years, but we’ll likely see more of “Tivo Inside” technology. In 2005 & 2006 they already made deals with online creators like Rocketboom and e-commerce functionality with vendors like Fandango. And lets not forget that Tivo has unique advertising options that the other DVR’s don’t with an already existing sales force.
Erik, sure you can count out Tivo already, at least with its current business model (sell the hardware AND the program guide). They don’t have a big enough subscriber base to make the unique advertising prospects interesting. While Jupiter vs. XYZ does sometimes vary greatly, you can feast your eyes upon Tivo’s SEC filings.
There’s a new earnings release coming out 8/29. In the last earnings release they shrunk the overall subscriber base (due to continued bleeding of DTV customers) and added only 1000 net new “tivo owned” subscribers for that period. They can increase this 10 fold, and it’s still not very pretty.
The sell the hardware and the program guide model does not work when your competitor gives the hardware away. The competitions’ hardware may be inferior, but as they say “you can’t compete with free.”
TiVo has already won a significant judgement in a patent lawsuit against Echostar. The judgement is pending on appeal, but I think it’s pretty likely that Echostar will ultimately have to pay up. Not only will that dollar amount (in the $100M range last I checked, and rising with interest) be a nice cash infusion for the company, you can bet it will bring the generic DVR makers to the table, and TiVo will be looking for their cut of the monthly fees from every DVR out there.
Another bright area is that News Corp sold off DIRECTV, and News Corp was the cause of DIRECTV crapping all over TiVo for the last couple of years. They dumped the DIRECTiVo boxes in favor of the NDS DVR boxes only because News Corp owns a chunk of NDS (and of course customers who got the NDS DVR generally hated it). The new owners seem to be engaging with TiVo again, as they’ve already contracted for software updates for the existing DIRECTiVo boxes, when News Corp had basically told users their TiVo boxes were at End-of-Life.
Disclaimer: I am probably deluded about all the positive prospects for TiVo because I still own a few thousand shares, and I worked hard for years to build these things. 🙂
Wow, very interesting Former Tivo Guy — $88 million is a lot of cash. Oral arguments for the appeal are scheduled for 10/4/07 according to:
http://investor.tivo.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=260593