TiVo Stream 4K-powered Smart TVs Coming in ‘Late 2021, Early 2022’

GLWT

 

TiVo’s Stream 4k is Its Fastest-Selling Hardware

 

Only thing worse than a Roku powered TV is a TiVo powered one. I wouldn't touch either.

 

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Customer: "So I'll be able to record on a Tivo-powered TV like a regular Tivo? Great!"
Tivo: "Actually no. It's just an Andriod TV with the Tivo name on it. Same as Sony has had on the market for years. But it will run our extremely limited and buggy content aggregator app."
Customer: "At least it can stream from the Tivo I already have as well as give me access to a world of streaming apps."
Tivo: "Actually no. It won't stream from your Tivo other than just plugging it in the HDMI port as usual. But you can subscribe to Sling for cloud recording."
Customer: "My smart TV already has Sling. Guess I'll keep my Sony or get a Fire TV that actually can record, and use ReelGood for an aggregator."

Later in the Tivo board room:
CEO to engineer: "Our TV is a flop. Why did you fail?"
Engineer: "Instead of implementing actually useful functionality that we invented, the DVR, we simply released yet another version of something that's already been in a saturated market for a decade."
CEO to engineer: "You're fired. Time to do another merger deal to keep us on life support for a couple more years."

 

Paraphrased from Other People's Money:

"This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Streamers. New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead alright. We're just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies makin' buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future."

DVRs are a dead technology. If TiVo doesn't look forward, invest in something with a future, they should just shut the company down now.

 

I think its fair to say that Tivo gets this and that is why they aren't trying to make a DVR with the Stream. Here is what the Wikipedia entry for Tivo says...

TiVo Corporation, formerly known as the Rovi Corporation and Macrovision Solutions Corporation, was an American technology company. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company is primarily involved in licensing its intellectual property within the consumer electronics industry, including digital rights management, electronic program guide software, and metadata. The company holds over 6,000 pending and registered patents.[2] The company also provides analytics and recommendation platforms for the video industry.

Interesting that the first sentence says Tivo "was" an American technology company. Not sure if the "was" is a typo or not, but the next sentence goes on to say that their business "is" DRM, EPG, and metadata". Tivo DVRs are not part of any of that, except maybe a consumer of EPG and metadata. I'm not sure where the Tivo Stream 4K fits into any of that unless its a lead to a partnership to sell EPG data to the streaming partners at some point. It probably does tie nicely into the "analytics and recommendation" piece of this that is an "also".

I think the DVR "could have" really been dead, but because all the providers are packing their VOD offerings so full of annoying ads that often repeat numerous times during on episode, people are turning back to the DVR. If they would allow people to opt out of the ads for some fee, then they wouldn't really need the DVR at all.

 

Given how slow their other products sell, not sure this is much of accomplishment.