TiVo’s Roamio OTA DVR Opening Up ‘Whole New View’ of Cord-Cutters, CEO Rogers Says
Having recently gone national with its subscription-based Roamio over-the-air (OTA) DVR and streaming player (see 1503040022), Tivo has “the ability to meet the needs of an increasing number of consumers who want to put together their own bundle of an over-the-air DVR, and streaming services like Hulu and Netflix, enabling operators to thereby sustain a video relationship with so-called cord-cutters,” TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said Tuesday on an earnings call.
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“To the extent that the market moves more aggressively in that direction, our OTA product is well-positioned and will be an important contributor to our growth over time,” Rogers said. The Roamio is priced at $49.99, plus a $14.99 monthly service fee and a one-year commitment.
Roamio’s OTA purchasers “have contributed to the uptick” recently in TiVo’s retail business, which “we hope will continue,” Rogers said in Q&A. “We haven’t done yet what I would call any major marketing of OTA, but the price point that's been available at $49 has certainly been something that has gotten significant attention among both Amazon and Best Buy customers.”
When TiVo started down the OTA “path,” it was “really coming off the back of the Aereo decision, where service had been shut down,” Rogers said of the Supreme Court ruling last June (see 1406260071) that sent Aereo into bankruptcy. Judging from Aereo’s grass-roots popularity, TiVo sensed that “there was clearly an appetite among some viewers to have some recording capability just for network television shows where they were paying for DVR, but they were not having to pay for their content, but wanted the recording capability for that,” he said.
The past three-to-four-month period has “clearly” seen the emergence of “more and more streaming services available on an a la carte basis,” said Rogers. With that has come “the breaking down of the bundle and the pay package that is giving all kinds of consumers more flexibility to put together their own bundle,” he said.
Roamio's “value” as an OTA device that provides DVR recording functionality for some and “a streaming service integration point for others, all in a single interface” is “kind of opening up a whole new view” of how people can look at an OTA DVR “not just as a recording device for an over-the-air signal, but as a key foundation for putting together their own bundles and packages,” Rogers said. “And I think that view of the OTA product is one that will be more and more prevalent going forward. And as we think about more significant marketing of the OTA product, I think you will see that being a key part of it as well.”
“Consolidation” in the cable industry “has been our friend,” Rogers said when asked about the possible impact to TiVo from Charter Communications' deal to buy Time Warner Cable. Through the Digitalsmiths cloud-based services provider that TiVo acquired in January 2014 (see 1401300069), TiVo powers “the advanced interface” of Charter and TWC through the Digitalsmiths “metadata cloud-based service feeds,” Rogers said.
Digitalsmiths nearly doubled revenue year over year, “much of that coming from an acceleration” of TWC’s Digitalsmiths rollout, Rogers said. Since Charter and TWC “are players with us on Digitalsmiths, we would hope that the combined company would be very much an ongoing player with us with respect to the growth of that service,” he said.
TiVo’s acquisition, announced Tuesday, of Cubiware, a supplier of middleware solutions for international pay-TV operators, “significantly expands our international presence with almost 40 operators across 25 countries,” Rogers also said on the call. The acquisition also “arms us with a more cost-effective product offering and helps us to expand into emerging markets,” Rogers said. “This will enable us to address a larger portion of the global TV market,” which is expected to grow to more than a billion subscribers by 2020, he said. “We anticipate that Cubiware will expand the growth of our operator business to new segments.”