Sling Media: On The Move

So where exactly is Sling headed? I know they’re moving into new offices shortly, but in the broader sense something is up over at Sling Media. We currently know them as the company that pioneered “place shifting” with the original Slingbox (and newer models) designed to broadcast your personal television feed over the Internet to … Read more

15 Yards & First Down For TiVo

tivo-ball.jpgI watch a lot of sports on my TiVo, but the best sport to watch on TiVo has to be football. By fast forwarding the dead spots in between plays I can turn a 3+ hour game into about 45 minutes. Frankly, I think that the NFL could sell these shorter games online under a highlight blitz package or something, but I don’t mind giving my TiVo remote a good work out if it means that I don’t have to sit through the advertisements or replays unless I want to see them.

What is a bit annoying about this method of watching sports though, is constantly going in and out of conversations about the game. At one moment John Madden is telling you that “the only yardstick for success our society has is being a champion,” the next he’s telling you that “the road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.” After going in and out of this for 45 minutes you feel like you’re going to go a bit crazy from the broken conversation.

I’ve pretty much just accepted the fragmented conversations as being the price I pay for having the luxury of being able to watch a game so quickly, but the Consumerist points to a hack that actually allows me to take the announcers out of sports programming.

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Digital Media Bytes

A periodic roundup of relevant news… Netflix Previews signal upcoming download service: Hacking Netflix Microsoft patents DVR targeted advertising: Engadget Delphi SkyFi3 reviewed: Orbitcast 12 days of Sling Media giveaways: Sling Community

Gotuit Launches SceneMaker

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One benefit to covering cool companies is the subsequent rise in status to “official insider.” After writing about Gotuit at the TechCrunch NY party, the company contacted me to set up a pre-brief on a new product announcement. The new product, SceneMaker – which launches today – is a consumer application for tagging video segments within larger video clips. Gotuit calls SceneMaker the “first social video tagging application.” I personally think the word social should have been retired from the lexicon immediately after Zune’s “Welcome to the Social” campaign hit, but semantics aside, SceneMaker is a welcome addition to the world of online video.

Scenemaker works like this: You copy a video URL from YouTube or Metacafe into the SceneMaker application and add metadata to any segment you want within the clip. These user-generated tags are called VideoMarks. Once a video has VideoMarks, that metadata is included whenever someone runs a search in Gotuit’s InVideo search engine. You can also embed a video segment on your website or blog that only includes the section of a video you’ve marked. For example, the middle 30 seconds in a three-minute clip.

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Deal of the Day: 20GB MS PMP @ $135

Today’s Woot is a Microsoft portable media player (PMP) for under $135. True, it’s a fake brand (Enza Dream’eo? Could there be a worse name?) and the unit may die at any moment — but 20GB with a roomy 3.5″ screen at about half the price of an iPod is a decent deal… as long … Read more

TiVo By the Numbers, Part 3

Financial analysis isn’t something I’m prepared to tackle publicly, so I’ve brought in some muscle for a multi-part series on TiVo’s numbers. Obviously this is speculative in nature and just one stockholder’s interpretation of the limited information TiVo chooses to disclose. Your mileage may vary. -DZ

In Part 1 and Part 2 we focused on TiVo’s biggest business: their subscription recording service. But TiVo has other irons in the fire, and to get a value for the company, we need to consider those items, as well. But first, we’ll finalize our look at subscribers.

In Part 1, we found that the NPV of TiVo’s current subscriber base (including a conservative estimate of the value of the DirecTiVo subscribers), but we have since discovered a flaw in our calculation of TiVo’s advertising revenue (which has also led us to some new insights – but we’ll get to those another day), which we have recomputed as an average $0.47 per month per subscriber for the past twelve months – less that we originally estimated. But we were also able to get a more accurate estimate of the cash flow of monthly and lifetime subscribers, and so we will use those numbers, too. These improvements have caused us to revise our estimate of the NPV of TiVo’s subscriber base to $407 million – somewhat higher than the $388 million we found before.

Lifetime Cash

Earlier, we hinted that there was a “hidden” value to the lifetime subscribers that we had not included. To understand this value, one needs to understand how TiVo accounts for lifetime subscriptions. When TiVo sold a lifetime subscription, they put an amount on the “cash” line of their balance sheet for the full amount of the subscription, and offset it with a “deferred revenue” liability of the same amount. The cash would then amortize over the expected lifetime of the subscription. TiVo picked 48 months as the lifetime of the subscription, so for a $299 lifetime subscription, that amounts to $6.23 per month. Then, each quarter, TiVo takes the appropriate amount of cash

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The Xbox 360 Video Marketplace

Now that the Xbox 360 Video Marketplace has been live for a little over two weeks, I’d like to share a few thoughts. The Video Marketplace provides Xbox 360 owners the ability to download television show and movies — some in high definition. Keep in mind, the November 7th announcement encouraged me to get off … Read more

Digital Media Bytes

A periodic roundup of relevant news… Hands on with the Loop motion controlled remote : Gizmodo Orb adds mobile YouTube search: PVRWire Mods to quiet your (my) Xbox 360: Extreme Tech Portable Audiovox XM receiver discovered: Orbitcast Sony PSP GPS accessory hits the market: Engadget