Last quarter Tivo got around $20,000,000 in lifetime subscription signups.
oh really? that's very curious, since their total service revenue for the quarter was less than $33 million. and that includes all the service revenue from DirecTV, where most of their subscribers reside. if you look at the "Tivo-owned" subscribers (1.141 million as of last Q), Tivo says 50% of them pay recurring fees. that presumably means the other 50% paid lifetime.
since Tivo only added 65-75K "Tivo-owned" subs in the Q--let's split the difference and call it 70K--and since 50% of these are presumably lifetime, that is 35K subscribers paying $300, which works out to just $10.5 million. or approximately half your hoped-for amount.
and, since Tivo recognizes this revenue over a 48-month period, the new signups recognized for the Q would only be around 12.5% of that amount, or $1.3125 million.
so the figure you stated--20 million in "lifetime subscription signups"--seems overstated by a factor of more than 15.
another thing you might want to notice is that the percentage of "recurring revenue" (as opposed to lifetime subscriptions) increased YoY from 40% to 50%. that is a 25% increase in the share of recurring revenue.
in other words, as Tivo adds more subs, a smaller percentage are opting for the lifetime option.
And lifetimed customers, IMO, aren't too likely to go taking on other DVR expenses unnecessarily.
as long as Tivo is a going concern, you are probably right. but since apparently less than 600,000 people in the whole country seem to be "lifetimed", i'd say there's a sizeable population of "unlifetimed" people for MSFT and others to go after.
and "free" is a pretty good price compared to $300, or whatever the monthly fee is. |
