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Technology Stocks : Tivo (TIVO) Interactive TV -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (1923)	12/30/2006 12:51:27 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2093

TiVo, Comcast on Pause Dec. 18, 2006 (Multichannel News) -- DVR Maker Has Yet to Press Forward Into Cabler's Boxes The installation of TiVo (NASDAQ:TIVO) software into digital video recorders already in the homes of Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) subscribers has fallen more than a year behind its original schedule. When Comcast and TiVo first announced plans in March 2005 to place TiVo's digital video recorder software in existing Motorola (NYSE:MOT) boxes in customers' homes, the companies said the deployment would be achieved "in a majority of Comcast markets in mid-to-late 2006." That has not been the case. Only this month -- the last of 2006 -- has Comcast begun testing TiVo software on Motorola boxes in a "handful" of employee homes in Denver, said Mark Hess, Comcast senior vice president of business and product development. Comcast won't begin its first actual market trial of the TiVo service until this spring. Hess declined to say if the TiVo service would be available in most Comcast markets by the end of 2007, or commit to a date for when it will be available nationwide. But Hess maintained that the tests -- which have required teams of engineers from Comcast, TiVo, Motorola and Comcast-backed interactive-TV company TVWorks to figure out how to download TiVo software to Comcast set-tops from cable headends -- are going well. Once the product has proven itself in test settings, the cable operator expects to hit the accelerator with deployments, Hess said. "We need to make sure it can be successful both from a technology and from a market standpoint," Hess said. "I don't want to set expectations out there later that we're not able to meet, for whatever reason." The stakes are high for TiVo, which hopes to use the Comcast rollout to convince other cable providers to deploy its software on generic DVR set-tops from companies such as Motorola and Scientific Atlanta. While TiVo was one of the first companies to market standalone DVRs, the company has lost market share to Scientific Atlanta and Motorola, which sell their set-tops to cable distributors. Comcast, Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) Cable and other providers lease the DVRs to consumers for about $10 per month, on average. TiVo needs a boost. It counted 4.4 million total subscribers to its DVR service at the end of the third quarter and is spending heavily to market its standalone boxes. It shelled out $10.1 million on sales and marketing expenses during the third quarter. Losing momentum can cost. In the first nine months of this year, TiVo reported a net loss of $28.2 million on revenue of $181.3 million, almost double the $15.9 million it lost in the same period a year earlier on $135.9 million of revenue. And TiVo expects to lose between $33 million to $38 million in the fourth quarter alone, due to increased hardware rebate costs marketed in retail outlets. Officials at TiVo said the Comcast tests are going well and the timing of the commercial rollout shouldn't come as a surprise, since the company has told analysts on earnings calls during the last year that it only expected to begin testing the Comcast product by the end of 2006. "If the initial market goes well, there isn't a whole lot that stands in the way of driving this to successive large markets in '07," said Jeff Klugman, general manager of TiVo's service-provider and advertising division. Downloading TiVo software to Comcast homes remotely is no easy task. It has required TiVo to write new code to integrate its software with Comcast's digital network, and to integrate its service with Comcast's video-on-demand platform and the operator's "TV Navigator" software platform, which runs on its set-top boxes. But once the process proves successful, it would allow Comcast to deploy TiVo's service to set-tops in existing homes without the added cost of sending out field technicians. money.cnn.com