Gracenote (formerly known as Tribune Media Services, Inc.) is currently the sole supplier of the program guide data for the TiVo service and we are transitioning the TiVo service to program guide data supplied by Rovi Corporation. Gracenote is the current sole supplier of program guide data for the TiVo service. Our current Television Listings Data Agreement with Gracenote expired on May 19, 2016. On April 28, 2016, we entered into an agreement with Rovi Corporation to supply program guide data for the TiVo service after the expiration of our agreement with Gracenote. Our agreement with Gracenote provides us with a wind-down period post-expiration to allow for the transition of the TiVo service from use of Gracenote to alternative program guide data. Gracenote has indicated that it is unwilling to provide a short term extension and that any longer term extension would be at a significant increase in cost. If we are unable to transition the TiVo service to use program guide data from Rovi by the end of the wind-down period (or if Gracenote ceased providing program guide data to the TiVo service prior to the expiration of the wind-down period and prior to our transition to Rovi program guide data), we would be subject to a period of time in which we are unable to provide the TiVo service to our customers and certain distribution partners, or alternatively, we may be unable to provide certain features or functionality which are currently part of the TiVo service for a period of time for our customers and certain distribution partners. In any of these events, our business would be harmed through the potential loss of customers, distribution partners and the associated revenues as well as potential contractual penalties and damages.
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One of TiVo's strengths has been is comprehensive guide data and relationship with Tribune. Will be interesting to see what things look like post transition. For "wind-down period" timing, what are we thinking - 60 days? a year?
Yep, how long is the wind-down, that's the critical question. I wonder how long TiVo engineers have known this was coming and when they started mapping over all the Gracenote data to the corresponding Rovi data? As someone whose done a lot of work with large commercial databases, I'm sure that process can be semi-automated but I would think there would be a ton of errors that would have to be manually vetted. Just think of all those tv shows, not just series names but specific episode identifiers. Plus movies, specials, sports, etc. Nightmare.
Not just the data itself, but how the data is classified or tagged... For us, how do the two data sources compare? Also, TiVo seemed to have a real good process for alerting Tribune to channel changes and such - you'd think with TiVo and Rovi merging, it'd be just as good or better. But who knows.