TiVo CEO: Comcast DVR ‘Easier Said Than Done’
Rogers Says Software Integration Into Motorola Boxes More Complicated Than Anticipated
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/9/2007 7:50:00 AM
NEW YORK -- TiVo president and CEO Tom Rogers said that the process of integrating the company’s digital video recorder software into Motorola boxes -- in its project with Comcast -- was more complicated than initially expected.
Rogers, speaking at the Future of TV conference here in lower Manhattan, said that in discussions with Comcast and other cable operators, the original concept was that TiVo software would be embedded into cable operators’ existing set-tops in order to simplify provisioning and ideally eliminate the need for a truck roll.
“The idea was… if you could somehow take a generic [set-top] box and download the TiVo software over the wire, if you could order it from your cable company like HBO… it would be an incredible product,” Rogers said.
However, according to Rogers, the development was “much easier said than done.”
“It was an enormous piece of rocket science to work with hardware, chips we don’t control,” he said.
Comcast’s TiVo project, originally announced in March 2005, has been beset by delays. In May, Comcast expected to begin commercial rollouts in August. Before that, the companies expected the DVRs to be available in a majority of Comcast markets before the end of 2006.
Rogers said Comcast has now begun rolling out the TiVo-enabled Motorola boxes in the New England region and that Cox Communications, which has a similar deal with TiVo, will follow soon after. “That’s about 50% of the cable industry between the two of them,” he said.
TiVo hopes that through the cable partners it can drive additional interactive advertising revenue. As part of the deal with Comcast, Rogers said, “in every TiVo home, we have the right to sell the interactive overlay on every commercial, on every network… That’s an incredibly powerful franchise we can develop... so we can look to diversify our business model.”
Rogers also sees great potential in developing the broadband delivery of content to TiVos, noting that almost 1 million TiVo users have connected their DVRs to the Internet.
“That will be the catalyst for the on-demand world,” he said, adding: “The cable industry made a bad bet… video-on-demand is a highly constrained infrastructure. We have 15,000 titles via Amazon, and they’re encoding thousands more each month. The video-on-demand infrastructure just can’t match that.”
As a point of differentiation from generic DVRs, TiVo will position itself as providing a "digital video retriever,"Rogers said.
“There will be thousands of pieces of content you want to get that won’t be on linear television. You can get whatever you want on your television, whenever you want. Then the [TiVo] brand will begin to resonate with what its feature distinctions are.”
For that reason, he continued, on-screen TV guides in the years ahead will need a search facility a la Google. “The problem with TV today is, the guides can’t keep up with the thousands of options,” Rogers said.
Touting the pop-culture cachet of TiVo, Rogers said that within the company, TiVo DVRs are referred to as one of three technological advances that have become indispensable to modern life: “It’s up there with BlackBerrys and E-ZPass as things people didn’t know how they survived without it.”
