Reports are all over the Internet that Comcast and TiVo reached an agreement allowing TiVo to provide Personal Video Recorder software for Comcast’s existing settop boxes and network platforms. Such a deployment is expected to take until mid to late-2006 to hit the majority of the markets that Comcast serves.
Most analysts have concluded that this agreement will sustain TiVo for the foreseeable future. In fact the TiVo stock price was up as much as 75 percent on the news.
It’s hard to know where to begin in analysing this deal because it puts so many things into perspective. Comcast must have been looking at its current PVR offerings in comparison to the new PVR coming from DirecTV; By this I mean the NDS PVR, not the DirecTV TiVo unit. Could they have concluded that enhanced versions of their existing PVR technology would not compete well with DirecTV’s in a few years? Or might they have concluded, as some analysts suggest, that they didn’t want to have to drive the development of a premium PVR user interface or directly deal with the more difficult network integration tasks, particularly when a deal could be made with TiVo (and their considerable patent library) relatively cheaply?
I’ve been a TiVo devotee since the dawn of the technology. I think that most of the analysts and bloggers who had TiVo on a deathwatch weren’t PVR uses themselves. Anyone who’s seen screenshots of the Scientific Atlanta PVR implementation that’s being used in some Comcast markets ought to realize that it’s got all the UI refinement of a Microsoft 1.0 software product.
I think Comcast had so many issues to deal with before its PVR lived up to the hype surrounding it that making a deal with TiVo made nearly as much sense for Comcast as it does for TiVo.
TiVo would have had to go Chapter 7 before I would have given up on it. It doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards now, as if it ever really was in the first place.