Tivo’s total subscribers fell to 3.46 million, approximately the same level they had in Spring 2005
When will Tivo finally turn around?
Today, the personal video recorder (PVR) pioneer released better than expected financial results, posting its fourth consecutive profitable quarter. Unfortunately, this will be the last one as Tivo now expects a $10 million to $12 million loss for its current fiscal fourth quarter on revenues of $47 million to $49 million.
But the Alviso, Calif., company keeps bleeding users: 163,000 subscribers last quarter; nearly 1 million since the beginning of the year!
A steep decline in spite adding services such YouTube and Netflix videos and signing distribution agreements with satellite-TV company DirecTV, cable provider Comcast and German software-maker Nero; that will all rollout/promote TiVo services.
“TiVo may have a valuable intellectual property portfolio, but its hardware selling business is over. For the most recent quarter, it sold fewer than 500 TiVo DVRs a day,” writes Bill Gorman of TV by the Numbers.
Last week, Tivo announced staff lay offs staff, taking a $1 million pretax charge for severance charges and outplacement.
Tivo is the best DVR service and people have been willing to pay for it, until now. What’s different, HDTV. HD Tivo uses cable cards. For me in NYC with Time Warner Cable that means ANOTHER $10 a month at least. If I want to use the dual tuner feature its more. I also have to give up video on demand as TWC doesn’t offer two way cable cards. And now with SDV, many channels are not available without an adapter. The apapter is still not available in most areas inlcuding NYC.
So I haven’t switched to HD Tivo and I use the horrible Scientific Atlanta 8300 DVR. My SD Tivo with lifetime service purchased in 2003 is still running on a SDTV