A periodic roundup of relevant news… Customer solves TiVo Series1 DST issue: TiVo Community Official S1 Daylight Savings Time opt-in fix: TiVo “Reel” hoops with John Salley: TiVo Toast Titanium TiVo Transfer fix: Roxio
Of the ~1.5 million Series2 and Series3 TiVo subscribers… How many are Verizon Wireless customers? With a compatible handset? Who want to schedule recordings via cell phone? And are willing to pay an additional $2/mo? If you’re one of the 47*, learn more here.
While I’m as excited as the next gadget freak by all the talk of the new Apple iPhone, the mythical Google phone, and Palm’s next SmartPhone-move, the new HTC S730 (aka the HTC Wings) could actually be my next phone. I have the Cingular 2125 right now and the clincher for me is that the HTC Wings is about the same size and weight as my 2125 and it has a slideout keyboard.
Cingular 2125 size/weight:
116mm x 46mm x 18mm, 106 grams
HTC Wings size/weight:
100mm x 50mm x 19mm, 120 grams
My copy of Vista finally arrived. Not as late as mid-April, but still later than I would have liked. The HP “Express Upgrade” kit came with two discs: an HP prep/config CD and the Vista DVD.
Prior to upgrading last night, HP had me disconnect a variety of peripherals (I declined), update my BIOS (was already current), and then their CD removed incompatible software that had been preloaded with my machine (most of which I had already blown away). The actual Vista upgrade took several hours, followed by running that HP CD again… to reinstall Vista-compatible software I don’t need (blown away a second time). I did have some trouble finding a NVIDIA driver that supported my LCD’s native resolution (1400×900) — Neither the default Vista driver nor HP’s driver update would go that high, but a direct NVIDIA download took care of it.
One stockholder’s take…
In its Q4 earnings release last week, TiVo stated that its churn had increased to 1.2%/month, up from about 0.9%. We took a closer look at this number and found some interesting results. When we did our financial analysis for ZNF in December, we devoted Appendix A to deriving real churn numbers from the data TiVo has provided. Recall that we found the churn for recurring subscribers to be about 1.38%/month. Also recall that “Lifetime” subscribers do not churn until 1) the end of the four-year period TiVo uses to amortize their revenue, and 2) the box has not contacted the TiVo service for six months. We discovered that Lifetime subscribers exhibited a “bulk churn” (i.e., an immediate churn at the end of the four-year period) of about 19%, and an ongoing churn of the fully-amortized subs of about 1.2% per month. (Both the recurring and Lifetime churn can be bigger than the total churn number TiVo provides because TiVo includes the entire body of lifetime subscribers, including those not fully amortized.)
At the end of Q3, TiVo had 138,000 fully-amortized Lifetime subscribers. At the end of Q4, that number was 166,000. But in the four-year-ago period, TiVo added approximately 50,000 Lifetime subscribers, meaning that without churn, the fully amortized number would have been 188,000. Thus, there were about 22,000 lifetime subscriptions cancelled in Q4. This result requires a significant bump in both bulk and ongoing churn of the Lifetime subscribers (we’re using 27% and 2.2%, but the numbers are interdependent and could therefore be any combination that results in the same total churn).
That leaves 40,000 cancellations of recurring subscribers which, when divided by about 955,000 (average) recurring subs during the quarter, gives us a churn of recurring subscribers of about 1.4%/month – nearly unchanged from the average over the trailing twelve month period.
Bill Koss has submitted a fascinating if dense post on Verizon FiOS over on SeekingAlpha. The main thrust of is that Verizon’s changing the rules of the broadband game the same way the H.M.S. Dreadnought changed the rules for naval fleets a hundred years ago. Okay, it’s a bit of an obscure reference, but the analogy is pretty apt.
Mr. Koss is arguing one thing that I’ve found lacking in most other discussions of FiOS, namely that Verizon is probably taking the most strategic route to long-term broadband success. Sure the cost of laying fiber is obscene, and the risks are not insignificant. But at the same time Verizon is literally laying the groundwork for a future of nearly infinite broadband demand.
A periodic roundup of relevant news from our other blogs… The Real Story on VOD: Connected Home 2 Go The FiOS Connection: Connected Home 2 Go TV Advertising – Staples v Office Depot: Digital Connection On Apple TV: Connected Home 2 Go
Last week, TiVo finally turned on TiVoCast for series 3 owners and so far I’ve been impressed, but it’s also left me wanting more. Over the last few years, I’ve read an awful lot about TiVoCast, but unfortunately have never been able to try it out, until now. It’s still a little too early for me to get a sense of how much I’ll actually end up using the TiVoCast programming, but already TiVo has made the service even better by announcing a new content deal with Break.com last weekend.
Break.com is a user generated video sharing site that will actually pay you $2,000, if one of your videos ends up on their homepage. Its look and feel are a lot like YouTube, but the quality of their content tends to appeal more to the male college demographic. This means that you won’t find critical documentaries on the site, but you will find plenty of videos featuring extreme skateboarding, practical jokes and of course people doing dangerous things after drinking too much beer.