TiVo surpasses 4.5 million subscriber milestone

Tuesday, April 29th, 2014
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Growth Validates TiVo’s Rapid Deployments for Operators Across All Screens, Throughout the Home and Around the World, Lowering Churn, Increasing ARPU, OnDemand Usage and Profitability

  • TiVo Is First to Deliver Integration of Netflix in Both Europe and North America
  • TiVo Remains Only Solution to Deliver Fully Integrated Linear TV, OnDemand, and “Over-The-Top” Experience, Allowing Cross-Catalog Search and Playback of All Video Content
  • Comcast Plans to Expand Successful Integration of Xfinity OnDemand Across Footprint for TiVo Premiere and TiVo Roamio Retail DVR Customers
  • Digitalsmiths Acquisition Accelerates TiVo’s Cloud Integration, Driving Additional Opportunities With U.S. Operators, TiVo Now Doing Business With 18 of Top 25 U.S. Pay-TV Operators

LOS ANGELES, CA — TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), a leader in the advanced television entertainment market, today announced that it has more than 4.5 million subs (including TiVo’s retail TiVo-Owned and pay-TV subscriptions) who are now enjoying the TiVo experience, surpassing the previous record number of 4.45 million hit over eight years ago in December of 2006. TiVo has emerged as the leader in successfully bringing advanced television solutions to the pay-TV market, underscored by a growing roster of pay-TV operators around the world that are deploying the TiVo offering to deliver a superior multi-screen TV Everywhere viewing experience to their customers. In 2011, TiVo had launched its solution with three operators. Today, TiVo has launched its’ solution with 12 global operators. Three additional announced partners intend to launch solutions in the near future, bringing TiVo’s total to 15 partnerships — far surpassing any other vendor over the last three years. With this execution and continued growth, TiVo has achieved the subscription milestone announced today.

TiVo has distribution deals with U.S. operators, including Suddenlink, RCN, Grande, Atlantic Broadband, General Communications Inc. (GCI), Astound, Cable ONE, Blue Ridge Communication, Mediacom, Midcontinent, Vyve Communications, and Wave Broadband. TiVo’s overseas deals currently include Virgin Media in the UK, ONO in Spain, and Com Hem, the largest cable operator in Scandinavia. Additionally, recently acquired Digitalsmiths’ ongoing partnerships with Time Warner Cable, Foxtel and Bright House, among others, further intertwines TiVo with an ever-growing list of operators across the spectrum.

Operator partners have attributed the introduction of TiVo services to attracting and retaining customers, including COGECO’s Atlantic Broadband, which in April reported it has increased deployment of customer equipment within the last year mainly due to the launch of TiVo’s digital entertainment services. Louis Audet, COGECO Inc., President and CEO, in an earnings call on April 10, said, “We are already witnessing increased primary service unit sell-ins as well as increased ARPUs… we are now winning new PSUs because we’re offering TiVo in 90% of the territory.”

During a March 6 earnings call, Peter Pounds, CFO of GCI, said, “On the video front, the increased demand for TiVo has increased ARPU and reduced churn.”

Jeff Klugman, TiVo’s Executive Vice President, said, “Our record subscriptions are the direct result of TiVo’s ability to bring real innovation to the cable industry. For example, it’s noteworthy that mid-size cable operators are answering the desires of their customers for whole-home/multiscreen solutions and access to OTT services like Netflix before the likes of some of the biggest operators in the world. This would not be possible today without TiVo. Our diverse suite of advanced television products and services help operators empower their customers to easily navigate the tsunami of content available today with a single easy user experience that searches across linear TV, OnDemand, and OTT content and delivers all that content, on multiple screens from virtually anywhere. TiVo’s solutions are value drivers for operators and are quickly becoming a must-have differentiator in an increasingly competitive market.”

TiVo’s suite of products and services for operators include the TiVo® Series 5 Gateway DVR, comparable to the TiVo Roamio™ DVR available in retail, TiVo Mini, TiVo Stream, plus the multi-screen experience delivered through TiVo’s Web, iOS and Android mobile applications. The TiVo experience is also available on 3rd party manufactured set-top-boxes including from Pace and Evolution Broadband. In addition, earlier this year TiVo demonstrated a Network DVR (nDVR) next generation cloud television prototype at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as an important next step for operators as they consider a transition to IP delivered content and utilization of low-cost IP clients and consumer provided devices (tablets, smartphones, etc). Finally, TiVo is the only supplier to have successfully integrated and launched OTT content from Netflix with Pay-TV operators in Europe and North America.

Expanding TiVo’s role and driving additional opportunities with U.S. operators is TiVo’s recent acquisition of Digitalsmiths, the pay-TV industry’s most broadly adopted cloud-based content discovery and recommendation service. Through Digitalsmiths, TiVo advances its cloud-based capabilities and will be able to offer its products and services to both operators who want our user interface, as well as those that are looking to build their own user interfaces but need a strong content and discovery service powering it. With this acquisition, TiVo is now doing business with 18 of the top 25 pay-TV operators in the U.S.

Klugman added, “As the cloud plays an ever more important role in how and where content is delivered and consumed, TiVo’s work to date building an increasingly hosted service, positions us well to continue to lead the industry with customizable products and solutions for operators that are quickly deployed, economical and deliver a universal and seamless viewing experience for their customers. We are excited about our place in the global market and are actively engaged in conversations with many operators around the world about how we can potentially work together.”

In addition to TiVo’s ongoing operator success, is the rollout of Xfinity OnDemand from Comcast for all TiVo Premiere and TiVo Roamio retail DVR customers. This integration across Comcast’s footprint leverages the award-winning TiVo service to offer consumers access to traditional TV content, the massive Xfinity OnDemand collection, and an ever-growing amount of web entertainment services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube, and Pandora in one, seamless viewing experience that provides an integrated search, recommendation and discovery experience across all these content sources.

TiVo and Digitalsmiths are exhibiting at 2014 NCTA Cable Show from April 29 – May 1. For more information visit booth #901.