TiVo reported quarterly earnings yesterday. And, as expected by just about everyone who follows the company (excluding AOL Daily Finance), TiVo announced subscriber gains for the first time in four years. The vast majority of those 117,000 net new subscribers come by way Virgin Media’s highly successful UK deployment of the TiVo experience (running on Cisco hardware).
Unfortunately, here in the US, TiVo continues to shed retail subscribers – with their net loss clocking in at 30,000 for the quarter. Stated another way, customer defections outpace new Premiere sales. I can’t say this came as a surprise either given TiVo’s limited platform enhancement and marketing in light of our complex MSO-dominated television market. Which is why TiVo continues to prioritize operator partnerships, like RCN, and patent litigation.
On those fronts, TiVo will head into court against Microsoft (regarding AT&T’s U-Verse DVR) and Motorola (regarding Verizon’s FiOS TV DVR) early next year. Speaking of next year, the continually delayed DirecTV TiVo is expected to finally see a nationwide rollout in 2012… although the companies are hopeful of launching in select markets this December. Unfortunately, we believe the product features TiVo’s former standard definition UI running on obsolete DirecTV hardware. Lastly, Comcast-TiVo video-on-demand integration field trials are underway with San Francisco expected to be the first market to come online.