TiVo slams rivals, anticipates Cloud storage
September 25, 2013
By Chris Forrester
TiVo’s CEO Tom Rogers has slammed his major rivals (Dish, DirecTV and some major cable MSOs) as providing second-rate digital video recorders. He accused them of not being “leading innovators”. Rogers was speaking at a Goldman Sachs media conference in New York.
He said that while some of the US giants have the scale and ability to afford R&D “it may not be in their DNA to actually be leading innovators.” He said that some Tier 2 cable players needed a company such as TiVo to do the R&D work for them and “we’ve become the leading company [in that area].”
Asked by the investment bankers what shape TiVo’s business might be in, in five years time, Rogers said: “There are still going to be devices in the home. Things will increasingly move to the cloud, as the TiVo services [do] today, but the fact is you’re going to need some kind of hardware. I don’t think everything is going to attach to a television set, I don’t think that’s in the operator’s interest.”