TiVo has officially announced their Roku Channel and competitor in TiVo+
Available exclusively to TiVo customers in the coming weeks, TiVo+ delivers live streaming channels and thousands of movies and TV shows to viewers in an app-free environment, making them easy to find, watch, and enjoy.
Listed below are the TiVo+ content providers at launch, but TiVo indicates there will be “many more to follow:”
Adventure Sports Network, AllTime, Ameba, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Baeble Music, BatteryPOP, Complex, FailArmy, FilmRise Classic TV, FilmRise Family, FilmRise Free Movies, Food52, Football Daily, Hell’s Kitchen | Kitchen Nightmares, Journy, Kid Genius, NatureVision, Outside TV+, People Are Awesome, PowerNation, Puddle Jumper, The Asylum, The Pet Collective, The Preview Channel, TMZ, Unsolved Mysteries.
I’ll go ahead and assume the same pre-roll ad technology is being brought to bear in this space to generate revenue for the company and its partners. And it appears, at least initially, that each content provider gets a tile vs the more category-centric approach that the Roku Channel takes to populate its guide. So TiVo+ looks to be essentially apps within an app at launch. However, TiVo+ can also be accessed directly from the grid guide (as marketed above) and signs suggest it’ll receive high level billing within the interface near ‘What to Watch’. Along those lines, the success of TiVo+ hinges on TiVo’s ability to execute the plan they laid out in 2018 to full integrate this video amongst our live television, DVR recordings, and streaming apps like Netflix: a truly universal content recommendation and search engine.