TiVo CEO Claims Preeminence in Bringing Variety of Web to TV
TiVo is leading the way in getting Internet programming to TV sets, CEO Tom Rogers said Wednesday at a Kaufman Bros. conference. About 85 percent of TiVo’s new HD customers immediately connect their devices to broadband, he said. “You can now get 30,000 titles through TiVo directly to your television set. Compare that to the average few hundred movies through cable video on demand.”
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“Pretty soon… whatever you want, whenever you want it, you'll be able to get it on your TV set, with your remote, really easily with TiVo,” Rogers said. “And we think that will define the future of television that goes well beyond what satellite and cable are currently delivering.” In a slumping economy, a new HDTV may be a family biggest purchase for the next year, he said. “With that, expectations of what you can get out of your HDTV set are only growing.”
Other devices that can bring online programming to the TV set are too difficult to use, Rogers said. “To get the world of what’s available, you need too many boxes, too many remotes and too many inputs,” he said. “It’s not an easy, navigable experience for the consumer.” In contrast stands TiVo’s often-praised user interface and program navigation system, he said. “Once there is that infinite choice, which is not unlike what exists on the Internet today, how people go about finding it and getting to where they want to get to quickly becomes a critical element of the whole TV consumption landscape.”
TiVo subscribers’ ability to avoid commercials is the TV industry’s largest problem, Rogers said. “Whatever’s going on in the newspaper industry today, I think it’s kids’ stuff relative to the impact of what this whole fast forwarding thing is going to be on TV,” he said. The media industry no longer can write off ad avoidance as merely a behavior of early TiVo adopters, he said. Within three months, any new purchaser is doing likewise, he said.
Interactive advertising can work on a DVR even though it’s failed before, Rogers said. The key is allowing viewers to pause programming while interacting with ads, he said. “When it’s in a DVR environment, you have the ability to make sure… the consumer doesn’t miss a minute of their programming.”
Dish Litigation
TiVo and Dish Network will meet Thursday in a Texas court to debate whether Dish subscribers can keep using DVRs that the court found to violate TiVo patents and the damages due TiVo since September 2006, Rogers said. “It’s going to bring to a head very soon this issue of EchoStar having to disable millions of DVRs that are in households because of its violation of our intellectual property,” he said. The worst outcome for TiVo would be an order to stop providing DVR service as early as October, Stifel Nicolaus analysts wrote. “As always the intervening events could prompt the parties to settle, most likely involving a license agreement, as TiVo has with DirecTV and cable.”