ALVISO, Calif., July 3, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ — TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that it will present at the Collins Stewart 4th Annual Growth Conference on July 10th. The webcast of the presentation will be available on the Investor Relations section of the TiVo website at http://investor.tivo.com under the events calendar tab.

Conference Details:
Collins Stewart 4th Annual Growth Conference
New York, NY
Thursday, July 10, 2008
11:00 AM ET
Tom Rogers, CEO and President

There’s been quite a lot of coverage of the TiVo launch down-under in the Australian press, which is good to see. All of that coverage should certainly help with consumer awareness. And the coverage has exposed few more tidbits of data.

Australian IT reports that Seven Network has imported “at least 20,000″ units for the launch later this month. There is one thing that isn’t clear from the coverage - if broadband is required or not. Some of the coverage implies broadband is required, period. But others make more since to me, such as Australian IT “consumers who buy TiVos must connect it to their broadband internet connection to be able to access the full array of services.” That sounds very much like the US where you can use the TiVo with a modem, but you miss out on all of the network-related features. An Amazon Unbox-like movie download service is also coming for Australia:

At this week’s TiVo launch, [TiVo Australia general manager Mark] Hughes said Seven would soon announce a similar arrangement to the Amazon movie service offered by TiVo in the US. “Before that we’ll be pushing some short-form video of maybe five to 10 minutes to the boxes.

‘But within six months, possibly a little longer, I would expect to be providing a movie download service as well.”

We also learned, through The Sydney Morning Herald, that Harvey Norman’s exclusivity period, earlier widely reported as three months (and as one month by a few sources) is actually six weeks. This was confirmed by Harvey Norman executive director, David Ackery. Harvey Norman is predicting that TiVo will expand the Australian DVR market by 50% within a year.

And they may be on to something. When the competition says TiVo has a good chance at selling at least 50,000 units in the next twelve months, that’s good news. Especially when the break-even point for Seven Network is below 50,000 units sold.

The Digital Products Group, which sells a number of different DVR models under the Beyonwiz brand, has seen its business with Harvey Norman crash in recent weeks because of its exclusive deal with TiVo, but its general manager, Jai Kemp, says he will still sell about 25,000 $800-plus DVRs in the next 12 months. He says a target of 50,000 for TiVo in a year is achievable, although 100,000 is not. Seven’s break-even point on TiVo is below 50,000 units.

“Fifty thousand is quite possible,” says Kemp. “They’ve got a lot of marketing dollars behind them and they can run TV commercials all night.”

And then there is an article from The Courier-Mail, which bucks the trend by being fairly negative on TiVo’s prospects. It is also interesting that the article also cites reports that JB Hi-Fi will not be stocking TiVo, even after Harvey Norman’s exclusivity period ends. That’s interesting because those reports were countermanded by additional comments from JB Hi-Fi before this article came out. And the article compares TiVo’s pricing to Foxtel’s iQ2, but leaves out the cost of the Foxtel subscription. But on closer inspection that isn’t too strange, since they’re owned by News Corp. News Corp. also happens to be part owner of Foxtel, the Australian pay TV service who’s iQ2 DVR will be TiVo’s primary competition. iTWire has done a great job of covering, and rebutting, the points raised in The Courier-Mail article, as well as adding some additional coverage.

Due to the July 4th holiday, Amazon Unbox is starting their weekend promotions a day early. And they have a fair bit to offer this week.

First up, they have a few titles up for $.99 rental: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, West Side Story, Man of La Mancha, The Awful Truth, From Here to Eternity, and It Happened One Night.

But that’s not the only rental sale running, there is also a $1.99 July 4th special featuring 10,000 B.C., Rambo, and Untraceable.

And there’s still more - the $5.99 Summer Movie Sale is still running. This time featuring: The Pursuit of Happyness, Men in Black, Bad Boys II, The Patriot, Big Fish, Hitch, Men in Black II, Black Hawk Down, As Good As It Gets, The Karate Kid, Groundhog Day, Bad Boys, Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, Charlie’s Angels, Can’t Hardly Wait, Donnie Brasco, In the Line of Fire, Ghostbusters, S.W.A.T., Roxanne, Sleepless In Seattle, Air Force One, 50 First Dates, Stuart Little, A Knight’s Tale, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Special Edition), Spider-Man 2,
Annie, Revenge, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Karate Kid Part II, Stir Crazy, Anger Management, Something’s Gotta Give, Ali, Spider-Man, Are We There Yet?, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Godzilla, Bewitched, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Zathura, Daddy Day Care, The End of the Affair, The Grudge, Maid in Manhattan, The Forgotten, La Bamba, Jakob the Liar, Casualties of War, And Justice For All, The Missing, The Deep End of the Ocean, Random Hearts, and Suspect.

That’s quite a line-up this week.

It would’ve been more surprising if TiVo hadn’t extended their rebates, given the track record for the last several cycles. They last extended them in April, but that rebate expired on 6/28. So starting on 6/29, and running through 8/30, a new rebate takes over. Slightly different terms than the last one - $200 off a TiVo Series3 (TCD648) or $150 off a Series2DT (TCD649), there is no longer any rebate on the old single-tuner Series2. You can get the rebate form in HTML or PDF and pre-qualify via TiVo’s website.

The rebate brings the Series3 down to $392.45 through Amazon (and as low as $381.97 through their 3rd party sellers), and the Series2DT down to $65.99 through Amazon.

Personally I wouldn’t go with either of those, but rather the TiVo HD at $249.40, especially if you’re considering the Series3. Get the TiVo HD and pick up the Glo remote separately and save some money. If you plan to use any of these units with WiFi, remember to pick up a TiVo USB WiFi Adapter.

You can also pick up a factory-renewed TiVo HD for $199.99.

Via TiVo Blog.

Remember a couple of months ago when the telnet interface to control HD TiVos was uncovered? As expected, the user development community has been hard at work producing tools to take advantage of this capability. And one of the most polished developments has tivoremote, for jail-broken iPhones. It is still very much a development project, but it has a decent UI - as seen here. And it can auto-detect compatible TiVos on your network. And it uses the TiVoToGo XML interface to download a list of the recordings from your TiVo to display on the iPhone for selection.

I love developments like this, they really show what the user community is capable of doing. At the same time, however, it is extremely frustrating and disappointing. Why? Because it is just a hint of what we could have if TiVo would only open up some APIs and publish them. If we can have interesting tools like this based on reverse engineering efforts of undocumented interfaces just imagine what could be done if TiVo would officially publish more of the APIs and enhance them. For example, the largest problem with the telnet control interface is that there is limited positive feedback of the status of the commands. If the commands returned the screen the unit was on, etc, you could truly remotely navigate the system. Currently developers have to rely on certain patterns being deterministic, which could break any time TiVo updates the software and changes the menus in any way.

TiVo could really engage the development community just by making some simple interfaces on the units more open. While ReplayTV did a number of things wrong, and ended up folding, one of the things they did right was having an extensive network API. This allowed the ReplayTV users to develop DVArchive, a very nice freeware tool. Their API extended to searching the EPG and scheduling new recordings, viewing lists of upcoming recordings, and more. I’d love to see community tools like this for TiVo.

Maybe someday TiVo will embrace the user development community and publish more APIs. In the meantime we still get to enjoy tools like these due to the efforts of the community.

The CableTechTalk blog has a very nice post up today about CableCARD and tru2way. While the blog is run by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), and the post in question was written by Paul Rodriguez, Director of Online Content for the NCTA, so you might expect some editorial slant, I thought it was a nice, factual article. It provides a concise history of the development of CableCARD and tru2way, as well as correcting some of the common misconceptions. I think it is worth a read.