In addition to focusing on small- and medium-size U.S. operators, TiVo will seek to expand distribution in Western Europe, Rogers said. But TiVo has parted with one potential partner in Telenor’s Canal Digital direct-to-home satellite service in Scandinavia, Rogers said. TiVo signed an agreement with Canal Digital in late 2010, but the company has undergone a management shakeup, including the departure of CEO Tone Krohn Clausen, and is said to have been up for sale.

“They had a big strategic process they were going through in selling the company and we decided pouring resources into a company that might be selling itself near term might not be the smartest thing,” Rogers said. “It’s not clear what they are doing and for the kind of shoulder that it takes roll out what we do, we knew that it would not be the best circumstances.”

So we finally have an explanation of what happened with that deal. It’s dead, Jim. Well, at least for now. It sounds like the door is still open if Canal Digital sorts their issues out and is still interested, but TiVo doesn’t want to get involved for now.

You might have noticed the first sentence in the quoted material, about small- and medium-sized US operators. That’s actually the main gist of the CED article. TiVo is seeing most of their traction in the US come from those operators, and not the big boys. So they aren’t putting a lot of energy into pursuing ‘Comcast-size’ deals. While TiVo’s deal with Comcast is significant, it is clear that Comcast’s focus is on their own in-house developed service, X1. While it seems that Comcast will fulfill their end of the agreement and continue to expand coverage of TiVo support for XFINITY VOD, TiVo is really a secondary offering for them. Their primary push is going to be X1, and understandably so.

Five of the largest MVPDs in TiVo-served territories – Comcast, British Sky Broadcasting, DirecTV, Dish Network and Time Warner Cable – are working on DVR strategies in-house and are unlikely to ever adopt TiVo’s software as their primary platform. I’d also add Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse to that list. While TiVo may be able to collect licensing revenue for their patents from these providers, there’s little chance they’ll contribute directly to subscriber numbers. But the small- and medium-size MSOs don’t have the resources to develop their own DVRs, so they need third party vendors to fill the need – which is where TiVo comes in. They’ve already had success in the US with MSOs such as RCN, Suddenlink, Grande Communications, and more.

Of course, they have landed one major MSO as well – Charter Communications. But the deal seems to be stuck in neutral. Charter began deploying TiVo in Fort Worth, TX last November and at the time planned a“full production launch enterprise wide in the first half of 2012.” However, in February of this year they announced they they were pushing the schedule out, without providing any new time frame.

Since then we haven’t really heard much, and Charter’s TiVo deployment remains limited to Dallas & Ft. Worth, TX. Rogers stated that TiVo is “working closely” with Charter to expand their deployment into new territories. There has been some speculation, which I also heard going around The Cable Show, that Charter might be one of the early customers for the new Pace XG1 running the TiVo software. And that could account for the hold up, waiting for the XG1 to be available, but that’s just a rumor and I don’t know that I’d put much stock in it.

Check out the Consumer Electronics Daily article for yourself.

Additionally MagnaGlobal reports that 71 million, 57.7%, of households will have access to VOD content, up from 53.3 million, 45.6% – though they include over-the-top (OTT) services such as Netflix in their numbers. Most interestingly they predict that by 2016 8.4 million people will be completely reliant on OTT services, aka cord cutters, up from only 87,000 by the end of 2011. I’m not so sure about that personally, I tend to feel that cord cutting is a bit overblown, but we’ll see.

Not as surprising, the report also covers Internet access numbers. 85.2 million, or 72.2%, of US households were online at the end of the first quarter, with 90% of those households using some form of broadband. By 2016 that will jump to 98.7 million, with 97.2 million on broadband.

In this regard, we are working in conjunction with CableLabs toward creating a standalone box that would be capable of providing the two way services provided by cable operators.

During the conference call Q&A he further elaborated that the Tru2Way-enabled TiVo standalone is seen as something TiVo can market to both consumers and cable MSOs. For consumers it would be marketed just like the TiVo HD, while for cable MSOs it would be offered as a STB for them to offer to their customers, just as they do today with Motorola or Scientific Atlanta boxes. This is similar to Digeo’s plans for the Moxi hardware, and it would offer a compliment and alternative to TiVo’s OCAP software for other hardware platforms.

The possibility of TiVo developing such a unit was first broached last November in an FCC filing relating to the Tuning Resolver:

In this proceeding, TiVo had expressed concerns about the cable industry’s OpenCable Application Platform (“OCAP”) specifications and license terms. In response to TiVo’s concerns, the cable industry has agreed to work with TiVo to make clarifications or adjustments to OCAP that may be necessary to enable TiVo to build what TiVo believes can be a viable retail DVR with OCAP. We explained that a TiVo DVR with OCAP would have a “TiVo mode” displaying all linear channels (including switched digital video enabled by OCAP) with the TiVo user interface and full DVR functionality as well as a “cable mode” running OCAP and displaying all cable programming services with the cable user interface without DVR functionality.

That was a strong indication that TiVo would be heading in this direction, but I believe today’s statements are the first to confirm that TiVo is indeed pursuing development of such a box. My bet would be on an evolution of the TiVo HD platform. This would most likely be mainly a software change, to provide the OCAP virtual machine platform, as well as the hand-off process for swapping between the TiVo platform and the OCAP platform. TiVo may be able to work off of their existing HME system, as they already have the ability to jump between ‘native’ and HME menus, etc. The major hardware change would be the addition of transceiver hardware to handle the bidirectional communication.

I do wonder if there is any possibility of these capabilities being introduced in the current Series3 and TiVo HD units. A Tuning Resolver could provide the bidirectional communication capability. If the existing hardware has the power to run the OCAP code, and I think it does, it could be a software update. But I’m not willing to bet on it, at least not until we have more details on the development effort.

HD VOD is now available over the FiOS TV systems in Richmond and Virginia Beach, Va.; Tampa, Fla.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Pittsburgh. It is coming soon to the FiOS systems in the Washington, D.C., metro area, Massachusetts and Rhode Island; and to Verizon’s remaining FiOS TV markets next year.

The service is launching with an initial lineup of 75 titles, which is expected to grow to more than 1,000 titles by the end of 2008. Via EngadgetHD.