Details from TiVo's Quarterly Conference Call

If you missed TiVo's quarterly con all today, you can get the reply via phone or web:

TiVo Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2005 Results
Host: Mike Ramsay, Chairman and CEO of TiVo
When: Monday, November 22, 2004; 2:00 PM PST
Replay dial-in: 888-203-1112; Password: 976927
Webcast link

Helpful commenter MegaZone posted his notes here and Thomas Hawk posted a review of the call on his site.

TiVo reported sales and membership numbers, but the real meat of the call were the details on new features and directions the company is heading. Here are the main points:

• TiVo To Go is coming by the end of the year. That's great to hear and backs up beta tester info I've gotten recently. It's almost ready for prime time and will definitely come out in the next four weeks. My secret hope is TiVo drops the news tomorrow, to help spur on more holiday sales of the units, especially this big shopping Friday following Thanksgiving.
• They're hot on the DVD burning TiVo. TiVo sold a bunch and feel it's different than anything else in the marketplace. While that sounds great for them, I'm not sure if it's a good long term solution for increased sales. I've always imagined my TiVo like a computer, which gets upgraded every two years, but I think of my DVD player as an object that only gets replaced when it breaks. When we're up to series 4 tivos that can levitate, the humax might not be looking so hot. Still, not many people have DVD burners, so maybe that's a great point at which to combine with TiVo and let them kill two birds with one stone.
• They talked about a standalone HD Tivo. They liked that DirecTV couldn't keep the HD DirecTiVos on the shelves this year, despite the high price, and are thinking of releasing a standalone unit. Of course, not many people will be hip to it if it only records OTA signals, so they'll have to get the cablecard stuff working for Comcast customers.
• Other stuff. They talked about delivering content via broadband, like the Netflix deal, since 80% of their userbase has broadband. I see mentions of the move towards advertising revenue, but not nearly as much as in the CEO's talk a couple weeks ago.

Overall, sounds like TiVo's working on a lot of cool stuff coming soon, with more on the horizon for them. [thanks Thomas and MegaZone]

Comments

[MegaZone]

And I'm still at work (been up 26 hours, at work 21...) ;-)

[Adam]

Now if they would just release a DirecTivo with a DVD burner.

[MegaZone]

Easy to beg them to enable networking and TiVoToGo. The satellite signal needs to be re-encoded for DVD, and you could make DVDs today with the HW as it is.

[Jeff Erz]

No wonder they say the DVD-R/Tivos are hot... my first TiVo, a Toshiba RS-TX20 (w/ DVD burner), just arrived today. Frankly, the $13/mo put me off from ever buying a standalone... I'm a Mac person so it wouldn't be as easy to hack together a computer-based solution, but at least with TiVo basic I feel like I have a free fall-back that won't render my box worthless. Though I see that "three days" of program guide are only accessible by clicking forward in 30-minute increments! Maybe I'll pay the $13, maybe I won't, but I think the recorder-combos are a great door-opener. For God's sake, it makes a lot more sense to me than pairing a DVD player and VHS vcr (which can't dub protected content) or the offensive mating of a long-lasting CRT TV with the eminently-breakable mechanics of a DVD or VHS player. Given that I can burn to DVD, it seems like a great escape hatch to get content off (losslessly) without having to hack, even if the burner is no longer state-of-the-art in a few years.

As for DVD players not being replaced, my old APEX (with loophole menu, from years ago) won't play most home-recorded DVDs and still has problems with seamless branching. DVD players are also constantly upping the quality of image processing and digital output. They're not as static as CD players say (though a single CD player seems pretty quaint, and space-inefficient, these days). Before rebates, an 80 Gig Series-2 is $200; the 120 Gig Toshiba can be had for $455 online, with the easy ability to offload content and free 3-day program guide. Given that I needed a new DVD player anyway, it seemed like a great option. It certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than any of the standalone DVD recorders without a hard drive! My $0.02.

[Jeff Erz]

Sorry, I meant that before rebates the 80 Gig Series 2 standalone is $300!

[New York]

The call was incredibly weak - and Im an ardent TiVo supporter with skin in the game.
Every quarter there is a new excuse as to why the stand-alone subs are either at or below the low-point of the range. This quarter heavy DirecTV marketing / uptake was the culprit - they should have seen that coming from a mile away. Assuming no NDS competition for most of 2005, this is a trend that doesnt appear to be going away.
TiVo outlined a broad new "strategy" on the call - use DirecTV to attack the low end of the market, and go after the high end of the market with stand-alones. However, its the DirecTV customers that have a) dual tuner b) HD c) a solution that approximates the integration of cablecard
If anything, Microsoft appears to be out-innovating TiVo in the stand-alone market. Theyve done nothing this year to increase functionality in the stand-alone box outside of HMO.
And its incredibly frustrating when Ramsey answers questions like (and he does it for various issues) - do you have any plans to introduce a dual tuner unit - we already have a dual tuner solution via DirecTV. Lack of a dual tuner solution must be one of the main reasons consumers opt for the cable DVR solution over TiVo - the general perception of cable customers is that because of the dual tuner, generic DVRs actually have more functionality than TiVo.

[ian]

I've had Tivo, I've had ReplayTV. I now have neither. A DCT6412 /w MSTV has found its way into the rack and unless TiVO or Replay can give me a way to time shift HD on cable with a dual tuner solution they are has-beens. Since I get VOD via the cable box, in both good quality SD and HD I have no need for no-def compressovision downloaded from the net.

I'm done messing with ir blasters and a STBs.

[Bobby]

My RS-TX20 came in today. While looking for the media type the burner uses (DVD-R not DVD+R), there was a notice repeated on several manual pages. It said, "Some content may not be saved to DVD due to copy protection rights..." and "Copy protected video includes DVD-Video disks, and some satellite and cable broadcasts."
It's starting to smell a bit like crippleware to me. A step backward from the VCR, which didn't put hollywood out of business when it made to the public. I'm looking forward to someone hacking this feature out of it. I bought the burner because my Dish PVR would overflow before I could get rerun episodes together in order to watch a series. If it won't burn it won't stay.