Advanced Television

TiVo CEO: “Lines blurred between content producers & distributors”

February 20, 2020

By Chris Forrester

TiVo CEO Dave Shull, speaking to analysts on the company’s year-end results, said the next five-to-10 years will see choices for consumers continue to simultaneously expand and fragment.

“This expansion and fragmentation is accelerating and the lines are now completely blurred between those who produce content and those who distribute it. Today, Netflix is making movies and Disney is a streaming service,” said Shull.

“Furthermore, it seems that every day there’s a new participant using new channels and programming in the rush to deliver digital content to whoever wants it. Because of this, what was once positive endless options for content across many devices has become a growing challenge for people in terms of the ease with which they can find, watch and enjoy entertainment content. Why is this? There is no Moore’s Law for consumer attention. Everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Attention to content and the time any one person can devote to it have limits on how they scale,” Shull continued.

He explained that TiVo had made some fundamental changes in order to better address these challenges, including splitting off its IP/patents licensing business which is still underway.

As to TiVo’s financials, he said the new businesses (now including Xperi) would have revenues “greater than $1 billion and combined EBITDA well in excess of $400 million. “For 2019, we announced revenue of $668 million, above the top end of our guidance of $665 million. We also made progress with our profitability,” he added.

“In January at the Consumer Electronics Show, we announced the upcoming release of our new product TiVo Stream 4K, a streaming solution with the launch price of $49.99 that allows consumers to discover and watch what they want from a single platform without having to stumble from app to app to app. The press response was phenomenal. […] the announcement generated more than 75 positive articles in tech, business and consumer outlets reinforcing just how hungry the market is for precisely this kind of platform,” he said.

“With regard to our ongoing Comcast litigation, TiVo is fully committed to protecting its intellectual property from unauthorised use and we are committed to our litigation strategy. We expect Comcast will eventually pay us a licence for our innovations just as its pay-TV peer companies do and as Comcast itself has done in the past. On that front, we are pursuing cases in the ITC and the District Court system. We just completed the trial in the third ITC case in January 2020. The administrative law judge’s initial determination for the third ITC case is due by June 29, 2020 and the Commission’s final determination is due by October 29th, 2020,” he told analysts.

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