Multichannel News has done the math and concludes that the ten largest cable providers have expanded their CableCARD footprint by a mere 5,000 decoders during the last three months. While I haven’t verified their calculations, I too perused the NCTA’s most recent CableCARD-related filing with the FCC:
The five MSOs who are required to report today – Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable – have deployed over 502,000 CableCARDs for use in retail CableCARD enabled devices. When the CableCARDs deployed by the next five largest incumbent cable operators are included, there have been over 536,000 CableCARDs deployed for use in retail devices by the ten largest incumbent cable operators.
Any way you slice it, there’s been a very small number of retail devices tapping digital cable over the years. And even assuming TiVo subscribers are responsible for the majority of those new 5,000 CableCARDs, I’d say their direct-to-consumer business is in serious jeopardy. Of course, it’s common knowledge that TiVo’s been bleeding subscribers and they know their situation better than anyone… Which is why they’re hunkering down with a large stockpile of cash while awaiting possibly more favorable conditions, defending their intellectual property (with hopes of additional cash), and succesfully diversifying by marketing their platform to the MSOs, who pretty much control the gameboard.
Oh, and Cox’s claim in that report that there are no CableCARD problems is complete bunk. In my first few months with them (starting Summer, ’09), I’d lose channels randomly and their only troubleshooting ability was to “ping” the card or SDV tuning adapter – leading to no improvement. A day or so later, the channels would randomly come back on their own. Also, as verified by TiVo, I’ve had multiple daily tuning adapter reboots. Maybe it’s TiVo’s fault, maybe it’s Cox or Cisco’s. Regardless, there is a problem. My troublesome TA (associated with a Premiere) was hit with a Cisco firmware update about two weeks ago and now experiences fewer reboots. But it still reboots.
“And even assuming TiVo subscribers are responsible for the majority of those new 5,000 CableCARDs, I’d say their direct-to-consumer business is in serious jeopardy.”
They installed base slowly dwindles, but the installed base abides. Once you’re in, you stay in.
The bleed is slow enough that if Julius and the FCC is serious enough about his guidelines, TiVo can live to see a day where they can market to newbies.
“Also, as verified by TiVo, I’ve had multiple daily tuning adapter reboots. Maybe it’s TiVo’s fault, maybe it’s Cox or Cisco’s”
Look, there is no “maybe” here. It’s on the MSO’s to ensure CableCARD compatibility for 3rd parties.
If Julius follows through on what he’s set in motion, the federal government will soon agree with me.
Petey, Once you’re in with a CableCARD HD TiVo you probably hang around… but I think a large number of customer defections are coming from folks moving from a Series2 to a HD cable-co DVR.
According to NewTeeVee’s look at TiVo quaterly report, they lost 464,000 subscribers over the last year. Not sure how many are true defections versus Lifetime customers they no longer account for on the income/revenue sheet. Of couse, a large percent of those are also DirecTiVo folks without outdated hardware.
TV By The Numbers often updates their graph after quarterly calls. Here’s the latest. You can see the quarter to quarter trend and it looks like TiVo maxed out 01/07:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/27/tivo-sheds-112000-subscribers-in-latest-quarter-down-to-mid-2004-levels/73435
Chucky, I suspect increased SDV TA flakiness when using the second TiVo USB port. I can’t confirm it, but I have a feeling… If correct, who’d be responsible for resolving that? I think it’d be on TiVo.
I don’t think those numbers add up. TiVo reported 35,000 TiVo-Owned Subscription Gross Additions in quarter ending 10/31. If only 5000 of those boxes “stuck” with TiVo, that would imply that 30K either returned the box or set it up for antenna only or analog cable only. Of friends that got a TiVo everyone eventually gets it running, but perhaps that’s due to my help / encouragement.
These numbers almost imply that about 85% of new customers fail which sounds suspicious.
Yeah, it’s hard to get an exact read of the tea leaves since TiVo doesn’t break down the data for us and their accounting is difficult to track. For example, a Lifetimed S2 or Series3 converted/upgraded to a Lifetimed Premiere probably shows up as a new sub since they can count it once again but doesn’t necessarily increase the total number of people in the TiVo camp. (And anyone upgrading from a HD wouldn’t necessarily need a new CableCARD.) I assume the folks who closely track TiVo’s stock valuation have a better handle on this aspect than I do.
TiVo can’t compete in the cable tv space anymore, they have to go for the OTA space and ip streaming hard. Start marketing that.
They are the best OTA dvr on the market that will also do Netflix, hulu, and other stuff for a few more $ than the channel master.
TiVo made it easy for me to dump fios and go OTA.
“Chucky, I suspect increased SDV TA flakiness when using the second TiVo USB port. I can’t confirm it, but I have a feeling… If correct, who’d be responsible for resolving that? I think it’d be on TiVo.”
If you can confirm a defective USB port on the shipping TiVo’s, then obviously the problem would be on TiVo.
But given that we’re not there yet, the problem is on the MSO’s. Either give 3rd parties access to the backchannel, or give them TA’s that Just Work. Otherwise, they’re out of compliance.
The MSO’s have no incentive to ship TA’s that Just Work unless the Feds get involved.
“Petey, Once you’re in with a CableCARD HD TiVo you probably hang around”
Yup. And that’s all they need to hold onto until they get a level playing field, assuming the FCC follows through on what they’re saying.
(I hate hitting the wrong Pseudonym field entry macro. Too much Boxing Day yummy leftovers…)
“TiVo made it easy for me to dump fios and go OTA.”
TiVo makes me love FIOS, and FIOS makes me love TiVo.
Al, I agree with your comment “They are the best OTA dvr on the market that will also do Netflix, hulu, and other stuff…” and in my personal experience, a Tivo Premiere with a cablecard is the best dvr period. (I admit I seem to be in the minority having never had a cablecard problem. And I don’t even know what these Tuning Adapter things do.)
With an old Mac in the back bedroom running pyTivoX, this one Tivo records endless amounts of cable junk for my wife and kid, pulls up our Netflix for TV and movies, and pulls up all my locally-stored video content. (And does Pandora and sees my iTunes library, though I don’t use those features much if it all.)
Too bad Tivo can’t get *my* experience to its other subscribers.
I may be one of the odd people out that to put together a Windows Media Center system with a Ceton InfiniTV4 quad-tuner card, but it works very well. And this is with two tuning adapters. I put together a whole home DVR (4 tuners – 5 TVs) for a very reasonable price in comparison to any other solution I found. I can’t say it’s anywhere easy enough to set up, but the only real hard part was getting the CableCard setup done. It was like Cable Labs would like to do *anything* but have this work.
Something about the numbers isn’t adding up. It looks like TiVo did have 35,000 gross additions as Martin says above. But at the same time, their net additions was negative 45,000. (80,000 losses minus 35,000 gross additions = 45k. Some stats here.) So did 30,000 of those 35,000 go OTA only or upgrade from THD hardware to retain their current CableCARD? Seems unlikely. I wonder if Multichannel’s or the NCTA MSO’s numbers are off? Hm.
Could FIOS subscribers account for the numbers? They aren’t counted in the nuimbers above.
John
Good call, you’re right that the NCTA would have unaccounted for CableCARDs since Verizon is the enemy. I’m surprised Chucky (or is it Petey ;) ) overlooked that.
“Good call, you’re right that the NCTA would have unaccounted for CableCARDs since Verizon is the enemy”
Of course, Todd Spangler is cherry-picking his stats, since FIOS is indeed classified as one of the 10 largest MSO’s, even if it’s not a “cable” MSO by Todd’s situational choice of terms in that particular post.
But, as always, one can rely on Todd Spangler being as truthful as the day is long in December…
Interesting comment about the “stickyness” of Cablecards. I’ve got two TivoHD units, each with a Cablecard. Both were straightforward installs on Comcast (thankfully!). Both are running fine for nearly three years now.
The other night, -both- of my TiVos froze up. I restarted, and they both came right back, but that put a shiver up my spine. One initial thought was to get new/Premiere units with the hope that I could move the Cablecards from the old to the new without even having to call Comcast. Is that thinking correct?
John, it depends on those specific cards and how Comcast handles it in your region. I believe Comcast usually pairs a card to specific hardware. But, as a former Comcast subscriber, I had one card (of three) that had some special powers which I could move around without problem. I believe Verizon uses unpaired CableCARDs, making things a whole lot easier. On Comcast, I finally got to a point of CableCARD stability and things didn’t start flaking out until I moved into Cox territory running SDV (requiring those flakey tuning adapters).
Assuming your card is paired, you could always trying calling in. Comcast doesn’t need to know you have a new DVR, you could try saying your card is unpaired and you’d like to re-link it. In that case, you’d just read the numbers over the phone and they’d do their thing on their end.
I am waiting for the Silicon Dust HD Home Run Prime. Once it is out, I will join the CableCard fray. I wonder how many other people out there will pick this up?
“One initial thought was to get new/Premiere units with the hope that I could move the Cablecards from the old to the new without even having to call Comcast. Is that thinking correct?”
Go check out the tivocommunity.com boards for a more definitive answer.
My (fuzzy) understanding of the issue is that you can swap CableCARD’s between TiVo’s on FIOS without having to call Verizon, but that that isn’t the case for most non-Verizon MSO’s.
But, again, my understanding here is fuzzy, so do some additional research before proceeding based just on my response…
“One initial thought was to get new/Premiere units with the hope that I could move the Cablecards from the old to the new without even having to call Comcast. Is that thinking correct?”
It’s worth noting that if Julius and the FCC follow through on the guidelines they laid out, stuff like this will be become significantly less confusing in the future.
I’m not a big fan of Tivo at this point, so it doesn’t surprise me. First of all, their new Premiere was released half baked so to speak. The HD UI was unfinished. A CPU Core is disabled. Performance is sluggish to say the least. It seems to me like it’s more of an alpha product at this point. Hey, at least a Beta is usually feature complete (or close).
Now they say that the new DirecTV implementation is going to be based on a 10 year old SD interface and last generation (HR-22) hardware. Wow what a failure IMO. Who is going to pay for a last generation experience? Most provider DVR’s can do what Tivo does, minus internet video which can be added with a Roku or Boxee. Especially now with MultiRoom DVR service straight from the provider with unified playlists and full support without paying a third party (tivo).
I just don’t see the value in it. I have DirecTV at this time in my new house (Comcast in my old apartment), and whether I had Cable or Sat. I would not consider a Tivo unless it brought something more to the table. Virgin Media’s Tivo looks nice with 3 tuners and a fully finished HDUI, and if performance is good than that’s what they need to bring to the Tivo Premiere and DirecTivo. If not, well you snooze you loose. Verizon, DirecTV, Comcast and Cox are all bringing HD GUI’s to the table at some point this year, so Tivo will be a moot point at that juncture.
Thanks for the input — hopefully things will stay stable for a while. As others have mentioned, I don’t believe the Premiere is “enough” of an upgrade for me to move from my TiVoHD units unless one fails. Of course, I’d then have to decide how to deal with my lifetime service option too.
“I don’t believe the Premiere is “enough” of an upgrade for me to move from my TiVoHD units unless one fails”
I’ve been on the verge of upgrading for a while now, and I may eventually take the leap.
I don’t even want the new UI, but now that the method of upgrading the hard drive has been open-sourced, I’d like to upgrade to a Premiere, open it up, and stick a 2TB drive in it.
The whole process would cost me a bit more than $300, but it verges on being a smart buy just for doubling the disk space, the much faster xfer rates, and the better UI responsiveness.
As a follow-up, I’ve gotten my hands on a transcript of the UBS conference that TiVo CEO Tom Rogers spoke at 12/6. I don’t think I’m permitted to republish all of it (property of Reuters), but there’s some good info on TiVo sales that may be of interest:
we saw a nice lift in volume from lowering the upfront price even though we increased the monthly subscription fee. We went forward with this holiday pricing in order to take advantage of what that may drive, particularly as it was more focused on broadband services as a key element of what people were going to electronic stores for. It had the benefit of increasing our ARPU and increasing the profitability of the sub while increasing our volume and revenue. So, if it works, it’s obviously a substantial benefit for us.
So far, holiday sales are going well. They’re above last year’s numbers. We’ll just — we’ve got the key weeks ahead of us still, so I think I’ll leave it at that
“we saw a nice lift in volume from lowering the upfront price even though we increased the monthly subscription fee.”
Toldja there was a market niche out there for that kind of stuff…