With the new TiVo streaming app?

because a Roku is $50 and a Tivo is $850.

 

That explains the increase of the Roku stock this year.

 

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How do you mean? Team up with a bigger company to let them white-label, say, the upcoming TiVo Edge and sell it under their own brand name?

 

I keep waiting for Walmart to just buy Roku. Think about it: they want their own answer to Amazon's Fire TV. They need a hero device for Vudu. There's a natural synergy between Walmart's retail efforts and advertising. Roku is creating quite a nice targeted ad platform. Not hard to imagine Walmart buying Roku, or a strategic chunk of it, and then just merging The Roku Channel and Vudu together somehow in a bid to become a major presence in the future of free ad-supported American TV. I would guess that the overlap in Roku users and Walmart shoppers is quite high, given that Roku is the most popular streaming platform and offers excellent value for the price. At this point, I think it's just a matter of whether Walmart wants to stump up the money it would take to buy Roku at its increasingly lofty valuation.

 

Sadly for TiVo, I doubt anyone much is interested in trying to do that. But maybe things will turn around if the TiVo Edge rolls out running on Android TV with access to all those apps..

 

It would be useless if you didn't spend $850 no?

 

Google would love those ads on the UI.

 

Amazon would be more apt to buy Roku and merge it with it's Fire TV ecosystem. Especially if it took away from Walmart acquiring it.

 

In other words you need additional hardware like a tivo that costs $850 with lifetime.

 

You know, I've wondered for awhile now why Roku doesn't come out with a model box/stick with at least one ATSC 1.0 tuner built into it that would offer the same sort of live TV with track play functionality that you get on a Roku smart TV (well, at least you get trick play if you plug in an SD card or USB flash drive). And while they're at it, it shouldn't be hard for them to just build in the same kind of basic OTA DVR support that Google Android TV has at its base system level. The Roku device could have enough flash storage built in to support pause/trick play on live OTA TV and if you plugged in a USB hard drive, you could get full DVR features. Sure, with only one tuner, it would only satisfy modest needs but then I'd bet that for most Roku users (who primarily rely on streaming), one OTA tuner is all they'd need.

Put it into their high-end Ultra device and include lifetime OTA TV listings and DVR service for $99 and that thing would sell.

 

Because TiVo is a DVR and no one wants a TV with a hard drive inside?