TiVo In The Hunt For Hulu?!

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On Friday (6/14), proprietary market intelligence firm StreetAccount reported that TiVo shares were up on “follow-through from speculation on a Hulu acquisition.” A rising tide lifts all boats? Or the first whiff of TiVo as a potential acquirer? Although TiVo has never been mentioned as a suitor, the company declined to comment on this note and reports indicate multiple firms have submitted bids for Hulu – with at least 3 exceeding $1 billion.

Mergers and acquisitions take various forms and a Hulu M&A will be no different. While we believe a TiVo-Hulu tie up is unlikely, by entertaining the notion we could imagine a scenario with TiVo sharing primary billing with some of Hulu’s current backers, perhaps Comcast and/or Disney, maintaining a small ownership interest to lower their cost while buying some say in future direction. The big unknown, irrespective of who ultimately lands Hulu, is what sort of content guarantees an acquirer would receive from the current owners.

TiVo recently settled with Google, Time Warner Cable, and Cisco for $490 million, swelling its balance sheet to over $1 billion. With limited debt, TiVo’s finances would conceivably provide comfort to Hulu’s owners as it is possible that they could maintain some sort of partial interest in a combined company. Hulu’s existing owners would appreciate TiVo’s neutrality, as the “Switzerland of the cable industry” – having partnered with many top US MSOs.

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TiVo Mini IR Extender & Wall Mount Now Available

Having lived with the TiVo Mini in our master bedroom three months, we’re generally pleased with the solution. Yeah, it’s possibly overpriced at $250 (including Lifetime service)… but remains the only game in (my) town given Verizon’s FiOS TV Media Server delay. And that bug where playback drops towards the end of recordings currently in … Read more

Game of Thrones, A Song of Cable & Broadband

After taking in the annual Cable Show, what struck me are the increasingly complex relationships – shifting and unpredictable alliances, enemies now friends, competitors snuffed… with the final chapters yet to be written. Much like HBO’s Game of Thrones. Beyond the corporate square dance, there’s clearly increased excitement surrounding TV Everywhere. So head on over to … Read more

The Cable Show Comes To Town

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Mari chats with ESPN VP Damon Phillips

The Cable Show has returned to DC and while the NCTA’s annual convention is winding down, our coverage is still rolling in. Mari, who hosted the Navigation Station panel (shown above), is writing under the Light Reading masthead and I’m preparing a story that touches on the cable industry’s complex and evolving corporate relationships with two scoops from familiar faces thrown in for good measure. Beyond that, I’ve got a couple more interesting products/solutions to share in the coming days. But, until then, here’s a sampling of my Cable Show tweets:

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Still No TiVo Stream For Android

From the Cable Show this morning, TiVo announced plans to offer cable companies partner-branded versions of their existing mobile apps. Beyond potential integration with TiVo hardware and services, the apps can also optionally tie into operator billing and account management. Atlantic Broadband, with ~250,000 customers, is the first taker and their “powered by TiVo” app is … Read more

Best TV Show Theme Songs

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE6_N-FAJnA&w=580] TiVo queried the Twitterverse for our favorite television theme songs. Tunes from Friends, The Fresh Prince, and Greatest American Hero were offered up as contenders, with my initial submission being the diddy describing The Jeffersons ascension. After conferring with Friends (of my own), Cheers is a no brainer for any list of top TV show songs. … Read more

Is ActiveVideo Powering TiVo's Cloud Initiative?

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ActiveVideo has been on a tear lately, having recently expanded “CloudTV” distribution with Cablevision, Charter, and Roku. The ActiveVideo value prop:

CloudTV’s “write-once deploy-everywhere” content environment eliminates the dependency on consumer device resources that has fragmented user experiences and limited the reach of “TV Everywhere”-type services. Using CloudTV to render the user interface in the cloud, service providers, content providers and content aggregators can offer rich, consistent user experiences and applications across existing and new STBs, as well as consumers’ existing CE hardware.

Where it potentially gets interesting for TiVo followers are a few comments from FierceCable’s Charter coverage:

Charter said it plans to conduct a market trial of CloudTV in an unidentified cable system. […] Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has told analysts in recent months that the MSO is working with TiVo on new user interfaces. ActiveVideo SVP and Chief Marketing Officer Murali Nemani said he couldn’t comment on Charter’s talks with TiVo. But he told FierceCable that ActiveVideo can support the TiVo program guide running on operators’ existing set-tops.

Last year, Charter dropped TiVo Premiere hardware for an unidentified “next-generation platform” that might still leverage the TiVo experience and we wonder who’s helping power TiVo’s upcoming Com Hem IPTV initiative. Surely these upcoming services are bound to be a vast improvement over the discontinued Best Buy TiVo TV and ActiveVideo has indicated that we’ll “be able to see how [they] are supporting TiVo” at the Cable Show next week. Stay tuned.

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TiVo Retires Agnostic Mobile Web Scheduling

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Looks as if TiVo has made the command decision to retire DVR management and scheduling via m.tivo.com. These web-based mobile features were originally introduced to the microsite back in 2008 … well before TiVo’s Android and iPhone apps hit the scene. Unfortunately, TiVo’s customer base runs more than those two platforms and some even prefer the efficiency of the (former) mobile site to the sluggish desktop rendition. Having said that, we imagine TiVo ran the stats and the usage numbers don’t support continued development.

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