Armed With a New President,
TiVo Will Court TV Industry
By JOE FLINT and NICK WINGFIELD
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
With the appointment of a prominent NBC executive as its new president, personal-video-recorder manufacturer TiVo Inc. is hoping to smooth relations with a sometimes hostile audience: the television industry.
"TiVo is recognizing that this is the time to bury the hatchet with the media industry," says President Martin Yudkovitz, who just joined the company after almost 20 years at General Electric Co.'s NBC, most recently as an executive vice president.
While NBC, AOL Time Warner Inc. and other media companies are investors in TiVo , the personal video recorder has created widespread apprehension in the television industry. The devices, which record television programming onto hard disks, allow users to easily skip commercials, something that the television networks worry will cost them advertising revenue. The devices have won some diehard fans, but TiVo , of Alviso, Calif., is still losing money and has little more than 624,000 users, not exactly a mass audience.
TiVo executives said the company hired Mr. Yudkovitz to help dispel the perception that its device is a threat to the television business. For starters, TiVo hopes to cut deals with the nation's biggest cable-television operators, which could dramatically boost TiVo's market penetration by incorporating the service into the boxes they ship to subscribers. TiVo can help cable operators generate new subscribers as well as reduce churn among current subscribers, Mr. Yudkovitz said.
The company also wants to persuade advertisers to use TiVo as a marketing device. Because it can track the viewing habits of its users, TiVo can use that information to direct advertisements closely tailored to users' tastes. For instance, the company can send trailers for coming action films to viewers who watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies on television. TiVo also has begun to sell viewer research to television companies and hopes to expand that business in the future.
Television industry executives "are out of denial, and it's going to become part of the TV landscape," said Mike Ramsay, TiVo's chief executive.
Mr. Yudkovitz, 49 years old, spearheaded NBC's investment in TiVo several years ago. While at NBC, Mr. Yudkovitz was involved in the launches of cable channels CNBC and MSNBC, and recently he oversaw the company's new-media businesses. Mr. Yudkovitz replaces TiVo's former president Morgan Guenther, who resigned in January.
TiVo shares were up 14 cents, or 2.4%, at $5.94 in 4 p.m. Nasdaq Stock Market trading. |
