Volume Delivery of CE Gear With Rovi TotalGuide Delayed to Q4 2012
Citing a more “conservative” forecast, Rovi pushed back the volume launch of TotalGuide-embedded CE products to Q4 2012 from the first half, Chief Financial Officer James Budge told us last week at the BMO Capital Markets conference in New York. Rovi had expected to have TotalGuide embedded deployed broadly across an unidentified tier one manufacturer’s TVs and Blu-ray players in early 2012 (CED May 12 p2). Rovi has completed the code work for the embedded TotalGuide, but CE manufacturers’ product road maps don’t show it appearing until Q4 2012, Budge said. The delay coupled with an expected “meaningful drop off” in Rovi’s analog copy protection business will result flat CE revenue in 2012, Budge said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Rovi’s design wins for TotalGuide earlier this year with Panasonic, Toshiba and Sharp were a break with the company’s belief the embedded version would largely be limited to tier two companies, as top brands developed their own guides to go with Rovi Media Cloud Services (CED June 2 p4). The pacts with Sharp and Toshiba followed complaints Rovi filed against the companies with the U.S. International Trade Commission seeking an investigation of products with interactive program guides and parental controls. The embedded TotalGuide also is likely to incorporate the Rovi Entertainment Store, the renamed version of the RoxioNow video streaming platform that Rovi acquired in buying Sonic Solutions earlier this year, Budge said. Sony and Samsung built portions of the TotalGuide platform including the cloud services and the video streaming platform and Rovi forecast the non-embedded TotalGuide shipping in 10 to 15 million CE products this year (CED Aug 11 p2). Rovi initially hoped to have the first CE TotalGuide licensees signed on by March 2010 with the first products arriving by late that year (CED Feb 16/10 p3). Samsung introduced products with components of TotalGuide in September 2010.
With delivery of the embedded TotalGuide-equipped TVs and Blu-ray players delayed, a version for cable set-top boxes (STBs) is moving ahead, Rovi officials said. Rovi is expected to demonstrate this week at the Society of Telecom Engineers Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta TotalGuide running on Motorola and Pace STBs, Sharon Metz, vice president of vertical marketing, told us. Rovi delivered TotalGuide programming code to STB makers and products will be ready to be integrated with cable operators by early 2012, she said. Rovi had projected bringing TotalGuide to operators with 10 million subscribers by year-end. The biggest is Charter Communications, with 4.3 million subscribers, including 3.4 million that get digital service. Rovi is expected to start trial deployments with Charter in early 2012 and begin field trials mid-year with a goal of generating some revenue for Rovi in Q3 2012 (CED Aug 11 p2). BendBroadband is expected to start field trials with TotalGuide in early 2012, Rovi CEO Fred Amoroso said in a recent conference call.
Rovi also is showing at Cable-Tec DivX Plus streaming technology that features secure adaptive bit-rate streaming that can scale resolution based on the bandwidth available because it used a single server file-based playback system. It supports H.264, a technology at the heart of Germany-based MainConcepts, which DivX acquired in 2007, as well as MKV, DTS Audio, 1080p HD, subtitles and multiple language audio. DivX can be added either as an embedded feature in TotalGuide or as a separate component, Metz said. Rovi expects to have secured distribution for DivX Plus streaming technology with CE manufacturers by CES in January, a company spokesman said. DivX Plus streaming also will be implemented in early 2012 with the Rovi Entertainment Store to allow a movie to be paused in the home and watched elsewhere.on an iPad or notebook PC. Rovi’s DivX-related revenue is expected to be $90 million to $100 million this year, Budge said. Meanwhile, Blue Ridge Communications and Buckeye Cable have signed licensing agreements to deploy TotalGuide xD, joining a roster of cable operators that also includes BendBroadband and Armstrong Cable. Armstrong, which started trials with xD in April, and BendBroadband are expected to introduce the technology late this year, Rovi officials have said. TotalGuide is a customizable media guide that allows operators to extend content viewing, search and discovery across tablets and smartphones. TotalGuide xD will be targeted at Rovi’s I-Guide and Passport interactive program guide customers.
Sales of analog copy protection and Roxio PC software are declining, company officials told analysts. Analog copy protection revenue is expected to drop to $23 million to $27 million in 2012 from $70 million to $80 million. While sales this year of Rovi’s Roxio software, which includes DVD Play and other titles, were expected to be flat with 2010, “it will definitely be declining as we move forward,” Amoroso said. Roxio software sales are expected to be $75 million to $80 million, Amoroso said.
With only a handful of titles expected to be available by year-end, UltraViolet digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system aren’t expected to provide “material” revenue to Rovi for some time, Budge said at the BMO conference. UltraViolet allows users to stream and download purchased content to multiple platforms and devices. Rovi’s revenue from UltraViolet could be similar to that supplied by analog copy protection at “cents per disc on the legal DVD copy,” Budge said.