TiVo Loves Cable

A few years ago, TiVo was in lengthy DVR patent legal battle with cable vendors and operators including Motorola and Time Warner Cable (all disputes have already been settled). Today, cable and TiVo go together like peanut butter and jelly. Though TiVo’s $50 Roamio OTA, launched earlier this year, is considered by many as a cable alternative, the feature could potentially be part of cable’s offering, said CEO Tom Rogers. The device is just like the most basic model of the TiVo Roamio, minus the CableCARD. Users simply need an antenna to access their local broadcast programming. The service might become “an operator-offered product to allow them to have a video relationship to someone who is a broadband subscriber… People who have cut the [cable] cords are still paying cable for broadband services,” Rogers said at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference Mon. Unlike Aereo ’s technology, which was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, Roamio OTA uses devices in the home to record video, instead of recording it outside the home and then streaming it to devices. Roger said he was surprised at the amount of press that the Aereo case has received. TiVo then looked at its offerings and found out that many subs have purchased lower-end DVR services without using a CableCARD to record OTA channels and integrate the box with OTT content. “They [subs] are doing it without us marketing it at all,” Rogers said. On the subscriber side, TiVo is finally making inroads among cable ops after years of struggle. It recently surpassed the 5mln sub mark fueled by solid North American cable MSO growth. As the video industry transitions to IP technology, the key is to enable cable to exist in both the traditional QAM environment and the new IP world, Rogers said. Despite the growth of OTT services, the set-top box continues to play an important role and will exist for a long time, he said. He added that the difference is the device will increasingly become cloud-based, hardware margins will get “thinner,” and more and more focus will center on software. The video industry is moving from price packaging to experience packaging, he said.