That’s the excerpt from the top of their release. Right off the bat there’s some long-awaited news – the Boston area will be the first to get the TiVo service on Comcast. I live in Worcester, MA myself – which is, unfortunately, an island of Charter in a sea of Comcast, but maybe someone I know will get it and I’ll be able to check it out first hand. (Hey, even if I don’t know you, if you get this and you’re willing to have a stranger pop-in and mess with your DVR and take some photos, let me know. 
) From the con-call, the trials will continue into summer with the initial commercial launch planned for August.
Financial results are clearly improved over last year, with positive results instead of losses – including a positive net income. Analyst consensus was for a loss of $.02 a share – but TiVo posted net income of $.01 a share, once again beating analyst estimates.
One thing that jumped out as a wee exaggeration in Tom Rogers statement in the release:“And, through the successful launch of Amazon Unbox on TiVo, which now has about 10,000 titles available to TiVo subscribers, we ushered in a new era of delivering premium broadband content directly to the television set.” If you go to Amazon Unbox and search on ‘TiVo’, you get 3,570 results. Without limiting it to TiVo, the total is 6,140. Not nearly 10,000, either way. In a comment, TiVo’s Stephen Mack pointed out that Amazon Unbox lists seasons of TV series as one ‘title’ in the search results, instead of each episode. So that would likely account for the discrepancy between the number given in the interface and the 10,000 figure stated by Rogers. On the con-call Rogers did say ordering Unbox videos from the TiVo with the remote will be coming to the TiVo service soon.
Rogers once again mentioned“introducing a lower priced HD box later this year”. And:
– Third, we continue to make progress toward a lower-priced, mass appeal
High Definition unit, which is expected to be available later this year
and will complement the important role that TiVo is playing in working
with retailers to offer High Definition products and services to
consumers.
I can’t wait to see what that box looks like – and what the price point is. I’d guess $300-400.
TiVo-owned gross subscriber additions for the first quarter were 57,000, compared to 91,000 a year ago, or 1,000 net additions compared to 51,000 a year ago. Overall TiVo-owned subs are up to over 1.7 million, compared to 1.5 million a year ago. DirecTV subs continue to decline, as expected with 103,000 net losses, compared to 2,000 net additions last year. Churn is 1.1%, up from 0.9% a year ago, but down from 1.2% last quarter. (This is very low churn.) TiVo’s total subscriptions are down slightly to 4.3 million compared to 4.4 a year ago, but now 59% of those are TiVo-owned, compared to 52% last year. TiVo-owned subs are worth far more to TiVo.
From the Q&A, almost 60% of S2DT, over 80% S3, and over 50% of all new subscribers are using broadband.
And important fact relating to the Australian deal announced yesterday is that Australia uses DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial) for broadcasts. This same standard is widely used around the world, and dominates in Europe. The product development work done for the Australian product will support development of products for additional world markets that use DVB, in the same way that developing OCAP software for Comcast allowed TiVo to also work with Cox, and to pursue additional cable MSOs. Most of the development work is being funded by TiVo’s partner, Seven Network, the leading network in Australia, so this is a big win for TiVo all-around.
I could see this being the way TiVo can re-enter the market in the UK, where DVB is also used. As they said on the con-call, Australia is a major English speaking market. So any development done there would be directly transferable to another English DVB-T market, such as the UK. New Zealand has also adopted DVB-T, but it hasn’t been deployed yet. Of course, TiVo has also developed a Spanish language interface for Mexico, which could form the basis for work in other Spanish-speaking countries. And remember TiVo is a share holder in TGC (TiVo Greater China), which currently sells TiVo-based products in Taiwan and mainland China, with plans to expand to other countries in the area.
TiVo seems to be picking up steam lately, with an increasing pace of software feature development and new partnerships. And it will be good to have the OCAP software finally see the light of day.
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