8 thoughts on “TiVo refutes rumors, says hardware is a 'core business'”
TiVo may indeed one day exit the hardware business, but it’s not this week as Wired declared. As far as I know the company held two rounds of layoffs in 2012 and have been telling investors for some time both R&D and legal spend would go down, so this isn’t entirely unexpected. Guessing Wired spoke to a disgruntled former employee without filtering. They also excised a bit from the TiVo spokesperson’s prepared comment specific to continued hardware innovation, presumably to support their dramatic premise. It’s very possible Roamio is the last piece of hardware TiVo produces… or designs in-house. But six months after launch, they’re not blowing it all up.
Journalism on the web is in short supply. That said, I also think this just might be the last generation of Tivo DVRs, but I just set up a new Roamio Pro yesterday and with the latest offer Tivo just emailed me, I just might order a Roamio Plus and/or Mini. I plan to always have a few DVRs for the rest of my life and the Tivo Roamio is the best option I’ve seen.
No we know why TIVO has been unable to bring a decent device for years — 7 engineers? WTF are they spending the money on.
I’ve never seen their $100 million in annual “R&D” explained with any detailed credibility. Their product output and BTB services don’t remotely account for it all. They’re fudging with what “R&D” means somehow.
With the Roamio Series5 being released less than 6 months (late 2013) the earliest TiVo would roll out a Series6 would late 2016/2017 at which point hard drive based DVR’s will be obsolete. So what would the engineers work on?
TiVo has said the future is cloud based DVRs and already has a nDVR (network DVR) prototype. TiVo Roamio boxes use non-proprietary off the shelf parts and are built by Pace plc which also helped in their design. And just look at the top of the line Pace DVR which shares many traits with the Roamio: http://www.pace.com/americas/products/set-top-box/cable-cc/mg1/
That being said I do think it sucks that after the Roamio release the engineers are shown the door. Hopefully they were given severance packages from the $1 billion TiVo slush fund.
@Mike – here’s Dave’s response on Twitter: “In a company of 450 that frequently outsources, letting 5 people go isn’t telling.”
That’s the only thing I found convincing.
The canned TiVo response to this was pretty bad. Nobody who is going to react to this (customers, negatively) cares about some cloud DVR they might be developing. Not sure why they brought that up at all. They should have just said what Dave said above.
@Bryan10024: Yeah but “Cloud DVRs” aren’t viable for most retail TiVo customers. A cloud DVR records everything I get at home, well except that its encrypted and the only way of decoding it is to get a CableCARD which I mail to TiVo? And they get the signal from my house how exactly? And all the TV I watch is now streamed over my internet feed and Comcast for some reason doesn’t block it or degrade it why? And my 250GB cap goes by in how many hours of HD watching again (70 hours per month at 8Mbps, assuming H.264 encoding, or about 2.5 hours per day, not including ANY other traffic like iPhones or game downloads or program updates or …).
A cloud DVR works great if the cable company itself deploys it, so TiVo may have a business selling cloud DVR software to small companies. All the big ones in the US are building their own (meaning Cisco is building one for Comcast to their specs for example) and wouldn’t be interested in a product from TiVo.
TiVo may indeed one day exit the hardware business, but it’s not this week as Wired declared. As far as I know the company held two rounds of layoffs in 2012 and have been telling investors for some time both R&D and legal spend would go down, so this isn’t entirely unexpected. Guessing Wired spoke to a disgruntled former employee without filtering. They also excised a bit from the TiVo spokesperson’s prepared comment specific to continued hardware innovation, presumably to support their dramatic premise. It’s very possible Roamio is the last piece of hardware TiVo produces… or designs in-house. But six months after launch, they’re not blowing it all up.
Journalism on the web is in short supply. That said, I also think this just might be the last generation of Tivo DVRs, but I just set up a new Roamio Pro yesterday and with the latest offer Tivo just emailed me, I just might order a Roamio Plus and/or Mini. I plan to always have a few DVRs for the rest of my life and the Tivo Roamio is the best option I’ve seen.
No we know why TIVO has been unable to bring a decent device for years — 7 engineers? WTF are they spending the money on.
I’ve never seen their $100 million in annual “R&D” explained with any detailed credibility. Their product output and BTB services don’t remotely account for it all. They’re fudging with what “R&D” means somehow.
With the Roamio Series5 being released less than 6 months (late 2013) the earliest TiVo would roll out a Series6 would late 2016/2017 at which point hard drive based DVR’s will be obsolete. So what would the engineers work on?
TiVo has said the future is cloud based DVRs and already has a nDVR (network DVR) prototype. TiVo Roamio boxes use non-proprietary off the shelf parts and are built by Pace plc which also helped in their design. And just look at the top of the line Pace DVR which shares many traits with the Roamio: http://www.pace.com/americas/products/set-top-box/cable-cc/mg1/
That being said I do think it sucks that after the Roamio release the engineers are shown the door. Hopefully they were given severance packages from the $1 billion TiVo slush fund.
@Mike – here’s Dave’s response on Twitter: “In a company of 450 that frequently outsources, letting 5 people go isn’t telling.”
That’s the only thing I found convincing.
The canned TiVo response to this was pretty bad. Nobody who is going to react to this (customers, negatively) cares about some cloud DVR they might be developing. Not sure why they brought that up at all. They should have just said what Dave said above.
@Bryan10024: Yeah but “Cloud DVRs” aren’t viable for most retail TiVo customers. A cloud DVR records everything I get at home, well except that its encrypted and the only way of decoding it is to get a CableCARD which I mail to TiVo? And they get the signal from my house how exactly? And all the TV I watch is now streamed over my internet feed and Comcast for some reason doesn’t block it or degrade it why? And my 250GB cap goes by in how many hours of HD watching again (70 hours per month at 8Mbps, assuming H.264 encoding, or about 2.5 hours per day, not including ANY other traffic like iPhones or game downloads or program updates or …).
A cloud DVR works great if the cable company itself deploys it, so TiVo may have a business selling cloud DVR software to small companies. All the big ones in the US are building their own (meaning Cisco is building one for Comcast to their specs for example) and wouldn’t be interested in a product from TiVo.