Interview with TiVo CEO Tom Rogers

Thomas Hawk writes "Bloomberg did an exclusive interview with TiVo's Tom Rogers this week where among other things he discussed the possibility of TiVo offering a subscription only pricing model (i.e. no upfront cost to buy a TiVo box), the increasingly important role that advertising, ironically, is playing in their current business model, and details on the upcoming Series 3 standalone HDTV unit due out later this year."

Always somebody's pariah

[Sloppy]

"About a year or so ago TiVo was a real pariah in the view of the advertising industry," said Rogers. "Today we find that has totally changed. Yes, TiVo does allow people to fast forward through ads and yes that's an important feature of TiVo, but the advertising industry has come to understand that that's going to happen no matter what. And the issue now is how do you create a new relationship with the viewer so that advertising messages get there and they are looking at TiVo as that platform increasingly as potentially the way to do that."

"Now we find ourselves embraced rather than a pariah and consequently my old friends in the advertising industry are still my friends."

For advertisers, switch from pariah to embraced. For customers, switch from embraced to pariah. Advertisers and (most) customers are ultimately in a zero-sum conflict, and you can't please them both.

Re:Why I am Red Hot Mad at DirecTV

[Matt Perry]

All that griping because of the lack of the home media option? You can get another DirecTivo for about $15 [directv.com] with no more commitment from DTV. I paid $100 for the home media option when it came out on the stand alone Tivos and wasn't really impressed with it. Plus you can easily install 4.x or 7.x software onto the DirecTivos (hey, you are posting to slashdot, so hacking shouldn't be an issue). Check Dealdatabase for the info on that.

In order to make it "seem" like they are making things better for us they have stopped all software updates for the DirecTV versions of the TiVo that add new features.

Except for the 6.2 upgrade about six months ago. What do you want, 7.2 like on the stand alones? You know, the version with more ads everywhere and slower than the DirecTivos? No thanks.

I have two DirecTivos and couldn't be happier.

Re:Only a matter of time...

[whoop]

Tivo works quite simply over a broadband connection as well. Even my antique first-generation Tivo allows it with a minor code in the telephone number and a linux box to accept the ppp connection. I haven't had a land phone line in about 2.5 years and this 1998 Tivo1 still works as flawlessly as the day I bought it ($400 back then, yikes!).

TiVo + Galleon + BitTorrent = IPTV today!!!

[MS_leases_my_soul]

I have a Series 2 TiVo and have installed Galleon on my PC. I am able to download public domain videos (like the original DOA and the old Superman cartoons) from the Internet Archive to my PC, and pull them to my TiVo from the PC. If the video is not in the MPEG2 format TiVo needs, that's okay because Galleon can transcode it by calling external programs.

My point is -- all the technology is here today. Hak.5 and DiggNation show up using BitTorrent (which I leave seeding for 2 weeks to show my support). Galleon transcodes to MPEG2 and serves to TiVo. I go to TiVo, pull down from PC and enjoy. Heck, I bet there are even people out there using some of the BT clients that read RSS feeds to automatically download regular TV shows. I guess I am a big chicken since do IT inside the financial community and would lose my career if the studios sent their lawyers to my door. But if SciFi sold a subscription to buy a season of BSG for $25, I would be all over it even if I had to seed torrents to make it happen. If I could get old episodes of Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 -- sold. If I could get more Firefly episodes right from Mutant Enemy without going through a studio -- I would PRE-PAY (Hear that Joss?).

Now, here is the problem I see. The TiVo 3 will support more codecs, support HDTV, and have more power. All of this becomes a lot more feasible with a TiVo 3, but TiVo now has a deal with Comcast. Comcast would probably not be happy if TiVo suddenly turned their PVR into the new cablebox of the IPTV revolution. Can anyone say lawsuit?

So, as much as I love my TiVo and the company, if they are stuck in bed with the devil, maybe Google needs to take the cash and go create their own IPTV PVR. Heck, Microsoft could even do it today using MCE and/or xBox 360 if they just .... ummm ... nevermind, nothing to see here, move along.