Thursday, March 08, 2007
TiVo-Amazon Put Downloads on TV
Things are looking up a bit for TiVo. The company reported higher revenue and launched a service with Amazon that brings video downloads to TV.TiVo still lost nearly $19 million during its fourth quarter of 2006, but that's down from a $22 million loss the previous year. Revenue was up 22 percent, which is encouraging, but the company that is loved by users but not investors still has to work on relationship building to be profitable.
The deal with Amazon enables customers to buy or rent movies or TV programs online and have them saved to their TiVos. This is very convenient, and I'm not so worried about Amazon's Unbox only being available to Windows users since Apple and Unix users are a small fraction of the world.
TiVo needs to embrace ad-supported video content as well since the company's ability to track consumer viewing habits is an advertiser's wet dream. TiVo could track the pre-roll and post roll ads that are being watched on downloaded videos. A partnership with a video search engine such as Blinkx or YouTube for subscribing to RSS feeds and showing them on TiVo (which I call DVRSS) would benefit advertisers and companies looking to bridge the PC to TV gap.
Posted By John Gartner at 12:59 PM
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