TiVo’s (NSDQ: TIVO) has had an eventful seven days: signing NBCU and its TV properties as its first major network ad/data partner; the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling on behalf of its “Time Warp” patent scoring a victory against EchoStar; even narrowing its losses for Q3. I caught up with TiVo CEO Tom Rogers following his presentation at the UBS Global Media & Communications conference Monday, the company’s CEO. Some highlights after the jump:
— The future of advertising: “Currently, this is a situation where you’re taking someone away from the key reason they came to the television set to begin with. Last week was a major breakthrough for us on changing that. The media world has been highly resistant to what this involves, because it means advertising is going to be consumed differently and the current model isn’t going to stay the way it is. Last week, NBC stepped up on behalf of its local stations and its cable stations and [agreed] to sell our ad solutions to their advertisers. That will begin to go a long way in terms of establishing what TiVo does in the area as the standard.” He naturally believes this will pave the way for the other three networks to take TiVo’s proposition more seriously.
— Broadband TV: Rogers said he plans to ramp up marketing of TiVo’s broadband content offerings. “A year ago, a lot of people were highly skeptical of this notion about broadband television, saying the good stuff isn’t going to be on broadband. But now that’s all changed, every bit of content, every movie, every TV show, user-generated to the most premium content is available via broadband. But then people said, even if it is there, people aren’t going to connect their PC to their TV. It’s an unnatural act, it’s just not going to be something they do. Between 700,000 and 800,000 of our users, are already connected to broadband without even marketing to them in a significant way. About 70 percent of new TiVo users right out of the box connect wirelessly to their broadband.” He also said that while TiVo has extensive content deals, the one holdout is Disney (NYSE: DIS) and he expects that an arrangement will be worked out.
— Not just a DVR: Part of getting more consideration for its different services entails opening up the definition about what a DVR stands for. “We’ve got to get people to start thinking of DVR not as a digital video recorder, but as a receiver or retriever, at least in TiVo terms, that goes out and finds whatever’s out there and brings it to your TV set. Beyond the deal that we have with Amazon. which has about 15,000 titles, and encodes about 1,000 titles a month, or the deal with Rhapsody, has about 4 million songs and is really appealing to people with HD sets and great audio.”
— Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) good: With Google getting more attention for its recent audience measurement solutions with EchoStar and the Nielsen Company, it would be hard to blame TiVo for feeling that the internet giant is encroaching on terrain it had staked out a while ago. But Rogers instead offered a more sanguine view: “Anyone that has the money and muscle of Google that’s helping move the TV marketplace in a way that our ad solutions and data are intended to benefit from, that’s fine. We have no notion that we’re going to be the only one to sell ad solutions or data. We sell a particular set of ad solutions and data that we think is quite compatible with the direction that Google is taking.” Given his friendly views of Google’s project, would that mean that a mutually beneficial deal could occur between the two? “I don’t comment on those things.”
Comments have been disabled for this post