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TiVo walked away from Comcast‽

This writeup from Engadget sums up my feelings about a story in the New York Times:

Ok, now we understand why TiVo CEO Michael Ramsay was promoted out of his job last week. You know how people have been telling TiVo how the only way they’re going to survive would be to convince some a cable company to license their digital video recorder software for use on set-top boxes? Yeah, well according to the New York Times last summer they were about to score a big deal with Comcast to do precisely this, that is until Ramsay pulled the plug at the last moment because he was convinced TiVo wasn’t getting paid enough money or given enough control over the service.

Remember how DirecTV accounts for 2,000,000 of TiVo's 3,000,000 customers and TiVo lost that relationship?  TiVo was negotiating with Comcast last summer and offered less than the $1/month that they get from DirecTV, so Michael Ramsay decided to walk away.

Now it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback in situations like this, but hasn't a big cable company deal been the dream all along? And in spite of sub-dollar monthly fees, couldn't the Tahiti strategy be an alternate revenue source for those customers?

To be fair, if the Comcast deal had been inked and then TiVo was prevented from introducing innovative products because of their threat to the cable companies we'd all be screaming bloody murder.  It's possible (note that word, this is pure speculation) that there was a non-negotiable clause that said something like "Non-Comcast video will not be available on the TiVo" which would have nixed any of the future plans like partnering with content providers.

When the story of TiVo is written, this Comcast negotiation could be the point when the company's outcome was decided.

by George Hotelling January 17, 2005 in TiVo

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