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Competitive – Or Additive?
At first blush, the “Buy on TV” service that TiVo is unrolling in conjunction with Amazon could be seen as a means of bypassing cable or satellite operators in delivering full-length movies to the family room TV, from an easy chair in that room.
After all, this successor to the Unbox download service that Amazon and TiVo introduced in March allows a viewer to pull in any video from Amazon’s catalog of download titles to either a Series2 or Series3 digital recorder of TiVo’s – which have to be connected to a broadband pipe to make this work.
And Tom Rogers, the chief executive of TiVo, has made no bones of the fact that he thinks his company’s ordering service and recording device can give viewers more wide ranging “a la carte on demand” options than a cable operator does, at this juncture any way.
A typical cable operator offers about 300 movies on-demand, he said at the C-Cor Global IP Summit in Cannes. By contrast, Amazon (and, ergo, TiVo) offers 10,000.
At this point, though, Rogers is not really comparing apples to apples. “Buy on TV” is not going to give a viewer instantaneous access to a movie. It’s not video on demand. Yet.
The purchased movie must be downloaded first, before a viewer can play it back. The downloading will take place on the Internet connection. Depending on the speed of a viewer’s connection, a two-hour movie will take 20 minutes or more to download.
Now, if a family wants to buy a movie, break for dinner and watch it afterward, that could work just fine. But it’s not instant gratification.
That will come, however. TiVo, as Rogers also points out, is a software developer, for delivery of digital content. And you know an update of the software that runs this service will allow viewers to begin watching a movie before the download is complete.
Eventually, the playback could start just about as quickly as an on-demand video. So “Buy on TV” could be competitive. It could be a broad, deep library – like iTunes – of video titles, purchasable or rentable one at a time.
But “Buy on TV” could also be additive to the offerings of a cable or satellite system. There’s nothing to preclude a Comcast or Charter or Cox or Time Warner Cable or DirecTV or Dish from working with TiVo to develop an Amazon-based store of past and present titles. The “Buy on TV” service could be part of the marketing of higher-end set top boxes to viewers.
Don’t forget, for instance, that TiVo’s Series 3 HD “digital media recorder” ($582.99 on Amazon already accepts CableCards.
And Comcast and TiVo aren’t exactly at loggerheads with each other. The nation’s largest cable operator is set to begin offering TiVo-based recorders to customers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire next month, Rogers reported in a TiVo earnings call.
For Rogers, the challenge is to make sure that TiVo is seen as a service, not a box: As the place where consumers go to get “ultimate control and choice” of what they see on TV, whether they rent, buy or record it.
For cable and satellite operators, the equation is simpler. Either stay ahead of TiVo on their own, with their own software, hardware and on-demand services.
Or add on what TiVo does, if there’s sufficient value and demand.
