Pants on Fire

When FCC chief Michael Powell last month let it slip that he’d seen TiVo and Netflix team up like the Wonder Twins on a movies-on-demand scheme (Cfax 9/16), the DVR maker was quick to tut-tut the notion. An earlier Newsweek story was met with similar denials. And just Wed, TiVo evp, worldwide ops David Courtney told a room full of analysts at the Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment conference that talk of a union was a matter of "speculation," although he added the companies were at least nominally cozy since TiVo CEO Michael Ramsay is on Netflix’s board. Wait, did we say "is"? We meant "was." Turns out, while Courtney was playing things close to the vest in Pasadena, Ramsay was resigning his Netflix board seat because he wanted to "avoid any potential conflicts of interest that might develop." Because while Courtney was telling a horde of investors and Wall St types that there was no deal in place, there, um, actually was. Both sides issued a tersely worded, 2-paragraph statement Thurs to break the news that was already broken in early Sept.