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Apple to Buy TiVo?
vallette writes "Reuters is reporting that Apple may be interested in buying TiVo. Seems like a good fit to me. Both companies stock price is up on the rumor."
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Not sure if the bandwidth requirements are there yet, but it would be an interesting proposition. iPod::iTMS, TiVo::iMVS (iMovie Video Store). Given TiVo's crapping on the Mac lately by not supporting AAC and no Mac support for TiVo2Go, I think this is purely wishful-thinking on the analyst's part.
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Frankly, I'm not really interested in paying $699.00 for a TiVo in translucent blue plastic.
Besides, it doesn't seem all that great a fit. TiVo is based on Linux, and Apple has spent the last half decade working on Mach/BSD. "Apple-izing" the TiVo would take an enormous amount of parallel engineering, during which time no new TiVo products would come out.
It's almost a cool idea, but I don't see it working.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Shouldn't that be "unpopular" canned options?
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
More importantly, Apple has the sizable cash reserve to prop TiVo up until a way can be found to keep the device from losing money. iMovie store a possibility there. On the other hand, why would Apple want to take on a company that is losing money? Does TiVo have any IP that Apple needs? Any engineers that Apple wants to hire but can't pry away from TiVo? If all Apple is going for is a good PVR device for some future Mac... why not leverage your own brand and build your own? Apple has the tech and the cash to do it... do they really need TiVo for a mere PVR?
I think that it is likely that Apple will get into the PVR business, probably once the CableCard 2.0 standard is finalized and it becomes possible for 3rd party devices to replicate and extend the function of cable boxes.
As a TiVo owner, I'd like to see Apple buy TiVo.
But as an Apple stockholder, I don't see what Apple gets out of the deal.
DVR technology? It's no great secret. There are open-source DVRs. If they want to buy the technology, Elgato is probably cheaper, and their stuff already runs on OS X.
The TiVo brandname? Apple is probably one of the few companies with little to gain from the Tivo name. Apple already has more brand recognition than TiVo, and they'd to better to merchandise a hypothetical Apple DVR as "the company that brought you the iPod" than on the basis of the less well known TiVo name.
The TiVo interface? It's impressive for a consumer electronics product, but nothing special by Apple standards. Presumably, Apple would want to roll their own, as they did for iPod.
Tivo's current customers? If they aren't making a profit for TiVo, why would they make one for Apple? Besides, Apple presumably will want to introduce something like the iTunes Music Store for HD video. This will require H.264 for efficient content delivery. Current TiVo hardware can't handle this. Presumably, current TiVo owners will be looking to upgrade in the next few years to a DVR with HD capability. Why shouldn't it be an Apple instead of a TiVo?
TiVo's patents? This is the only thing I can think of that Apple might want. But I'm not sure how crucial they are. They certainly haven't stopped cable companies from handing out competing DVRs, or Elgato from implementing one on the Mac. Still, I suppose that it is possible that TiVo has some patent that would be crucial to the kind of user experience that Apple hopes to create.
Eliminating a potential competitor for the DVR market? Again, perhaps, but at the moment TiVo isn't seeming like that big a threat.
I'm picking nits here, but Pixlet would actually be a terrible technology for this application. Pixlet sacrifices compression rate for the ability to do frame by frame advances. Great for an editor; not so great if you just want to watch video.
H.264 (aka AVC), however, would be terrific for this, since it's designed to scale all the way from HD to cellphone resolution.
Content suppliers are the ones who will have to meet consumers halfway and if what's been going on with the DMCA, Broadcast Flag, and other nonsense, I don't see this changing.
Actually, Steve Jobs might be the one guy who can do this. Remember, he's not just a potential DVR manufacturer, he is also, through Pixar, a content producer himself. So as he did with iTunes, he may well be able to work out a DRM scheme that is acceptable to the industry, yet not unacceptable to the average consumer.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
I could easily see Apple doing to DVRs as they've done to MP3 players--and if they pickup TiVo it would be all the more easy; the hard work is done, all they need to do is spiff it up and put that special Apple twist on it (make it purdy), and more importantly, make it marketable. IMHO, this is the one area TiVo has always been shy in.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
actually, you know what? I was going to moderate you +1, but I figured it's better just to post this: Why aren't there more people like you on slashdot? instead of the ordinary "slash and bash", you added the little "otherwise, great post" to the end.. and i thought that was awesome; a slashdot reader who DOESN'T have the soul purpose of bashing other people..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
An Apple product in every home.
Think of possible upgrades. "Buy a computer AND a DVR" at a switch of a button you can browse the 'net on your hdtv, click a button and you're back to watching the shows you missed while browsing on the 'net. Hell, it wouldn't be so out of the ordinary that the DVR and OS can mingle together in some capacity (but not too much as they would want to keep the setup as simple as possible).
When people buy a second home computer, they're going to buy the type of computer that's already found controlling their TV.
Microsoft gained dominance by attacking the business market back in the 80s. Gaining dominance now means that a company needs to attack the home entertainment market.
And someone will bring up how the game systems are trying to do DVR work. They won't succeed nearly as well because their is no line of succession past those systems. An Apple branded Tivo could lead to an Apple/Tivo hybrid (separate hardware in the same enclosure, don't make the mistake of windows mce) that leads to people using an Apple as their primary computer. Apple can do this because they do a great job of homogenizing their brand. An XBox has no consumer friendly interoperatiblity (sp?) with a Windows box.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
TiVo would seem to fit much better into Steve Jobs's portfolio than into Apple's product line...
TiVo doesn't carry a huge amount of debt. It carries just $7.3 million in debt. It has $88.3 million in cash, so the debt is minimal. Unfortunately, TiVo's cash flow is seriously negative, so that $88.3 million might not last them very long.
Apple buys Tivo. Apple ads a DRM layer onto Tivo. Apple starts selling MPEG2 and 4 movies at iTunes. Apple lets you download movies and watch them on your big screen, whenever you want, somthing nobody else can offer. Apple releases an iPod with a color screen...
Tivo has a large HDD, a network connection, and a large installed base. If you go with MPEG2 (still the DVD standard) instead of MPEG4, you A: save yourself a lot of re-encoding costs and B: incentivize buying a newer model with a bigger hard drive.
This would be great. I don't think it's serious, but this would be great.
Don't forget, Apple bought the basis for iTunes and the iPod before making them over with good design.
The ______ Agenda
Developing from scratch would take what, a year minimum? These boxes have to be solid. You can't just throw MythTV into a system and start shipping.
Buying TiVo gives them a running start. They can always call it the Apple TiVo or the Mac TiVo if they want.
So what you are telling me is that a guy that already has one hugely successful intertwined music device and digital music content sales system up and running would be unable to get anything done at all for a different type electronic content?
You hit on something I didn't realize, but completely missed it yourself as well...
Tivo's current customers? If they aren't making a profit for TiVo, why would they make one for Apple? Besides, Apple presumably will want to introduce something like the iTunes Music Store for HD video. This will require H.264 [apple.com] for efficient content delivery. Current TiVo hardware can't handle this. Presumably, current TiVo owners will be looking to upgrade in the next few years to a DVR with HD capability. Why shouldn't it be an Apple instead of a TiVo?
Ding ding ding! To buy music from the iTMS, you have to have a computer. Apple's missing out on selling to non-computer savvy people. It's also missing out on selling to people who don't have good speakers connected to their computers.
What about enabling TiVo devices to purchase music from the iTMS? Suddenly, Tivo's customers are profitable to Apple where they weren't to TiVo.
Jobs might stand the best chance at succeeding, certainly - but it will also come at some sort of price. My guess is - YOU will be the one paying it in the form of protected content, or limited types of content being available.
There is a reason why some music is not yet available on iTunes. Every company wants to own the online portion of this business and Apple - while they may be the biggest - is certainly not the only one. And we haven't even gotten to fighting with the big movie houses. You think Sony's Pictures division is going to be interested in supporting someone else's standard? I don't think so. 'Spiderman' is on it's way to a PSP near you but I'll be it would be a LONG time indeed before Jobs would be allowed to sell it.
What makes DVD ubiquitous is the fact that you can find tons of content of every type for it, and know that it will play on your player. TiVO has built a business on a relatively open platform - the user's cable tv.
I'm just not convinced that Apple needs TiVO to do 'iVids' or ultimately what this will get them.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
besides the fact that Apple computers actually look good :)
I agree with the gist of your post, but actually many of the "bootleg" TV episodes on BitTorrent and eDonkey are exceptionally high quality.
Many are recorded direct from HDTV and carefully encoded by real fans (doing virtually professional work as a labor of love). They have clean edits to remove the commercial breaks and good timing to avoid cut-offs at the end.
One proble I see is Apple has never been one for losing money on hardware to sell a subscription service (not that I tink that is a wrong strategy) and getting people to buy a $300 TiVo box would be a hard sell.
/.'er. TiVo's recently were in the $50 neighborhood at Best Buy, which brings them to the impulse price.
For bette ror worse, peopl will ocmpare them to $50 VCRs and think - $300 Why? Plus $12 a month? No way.
That makes it hard to get th market share needed to sustain it in the long run. Sure, TiVo does a lot more, but you need to convince the average consumer, not a
TiVo is not exactly a household name, and I don't see Apple changing it's business model to sell them. After all, we don't see cheap 40G iPods to sell iTunes.
OTOH, Apple could want some critical technology and buy TiVo to get it, then kill the service. Jobs is pretty ruthless with things he didn't invent, witness the newton, and some he did. Is TiVo NeXT?
OTOOH, Appple has some great hardware engineers, and maybe they could come up with a TiVo Shuffle.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Microsoft supports some open source as well. They simply have a different business model than most OSS projects do. If Apple supported OSS why is MacOS X still a closed OS? Just because Apple is a unix based OS, why does that make them better cross-compatibility? Microsoft's OS's work well in Apple, Unix & Linux based environments. I've had no problem working with all three in a Windows environment at all. No recoding needed.
Yeah, Jobs is a salesman; a salesman who lead a company to producing the first Unix easy enough for your proverbial grandmother to use. Maybe he's not an engineer, but he's smart enough to listen to engineers and come away with something useful. He's not a movie director, but he's smart enough to listen to a movie director and come away with something useful.
This puts him way ahead of most the CEO pack. His repertoire of leadership practices extends beyond posturing and playing power games with his subordinates, although he certainly does those things well enough.
You may rightfullly despise Jobs' personal style with respect to his subordinates (as I do), but at this late date it's pretty clear he's not some empty suit. In particular, he is smart enough to understand the strategy of enlightened self interest. In that respect, his ties to the entertainment industry give him the credibility that walking in their shoes and talking their language brings.
So a Tivo/Apple marriage could potentially be a watershed event in the whole DRM affair.
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Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I'm sure the TiVo apologists will emerge soon to defend their baby to the death.
Okay, I'll bite. TiVo collects anonymous statistics. The annual "most-replayed Super Bowl moment" press release is a marketing gimmick. It makes the handful of people who still don't know what TiVo is sit up and say "wow, I wish I could do that."
Sure, there's the potential for them to connect those statistics to customer names and sell it to advertisers, but TiVo has built a solid reputation for being a company, like Google, that "gets it". They earned our trust years ago when they turned a blind eye to hacking, and they've done an admirable job of walking the line between customer satisfaction and entertainment industry lawsuits.
Let's put this in context. Google issues a press release every year about their Zeitgeist site. Are you upset that they keep statistics on top queries? Does it worry you that every search you do can be traced back to your IP address? Are you outraged that this info may be used to build databases for Google Suggest?
If so, then put your tinfoil hat back on and let's agree to disagree.
Yeah, Apple would never base a product on tech they got by buying a company that had fallen on hard times.
That's why when it came time to design OS X, they made sure to start by buying a thriving, market-leading company with tons of customers: NeXT! :-)
Read my blog.
The main reason us Tivo zealots (as you put it) are not upset about the data mining is becasue Tivo is up front about the data they collect and how it is to be used. They also have a reputation for actually following thier privacy policy.
The last reason we are happy with the data collection is that we hope it will help keep good shows instead of the constant flood of crap.
Apple has a good relationship with the movie industry.
Yeah, its called product placement.
It's hardly going to take bullying to get someone to distribute Pixar's films. Unless Cars is the biggest flop in the history of cinema, any studio would be foolish to not want to be associated with Pixar.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Yep it could be a big win. ITunes for Movies. You download them to your IEntertainment Center and watch them on your TV, Computer, or Ipod Video. It is all too scary. Apple my be the one that beats out Microsoft. I for one will not welcome our new Apple overlords anymore than I welcome our current Microsoft overlords.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Apple could help transform Tivo where it needs the most help. Hardware R&D. If there is a company that knowns how to making PowerPC hardware smaller and cheaper it's Apple.
Take a $499 Mac Mini form factor. Remove the CD-RW, lower the processor speed, and use less expensive single purpose GFX hardware. You'll likely get hardware that is actually sold at cost instead of below cost.
Add to the mix the fact that you're reseting the company, and can visit media partners you'd previously blown it with.
Add to the mix being able to add the Tivo Software (Linux on PowerPC) to Mac (BSD-Like on PowerPC).
Leverage Apples Media and Content distribution services.
It might just work.
Ever since Steve Jobs took over, I have pumped $$$ into iPods, iTunes and accessories. And I have never bought an Apple product before. Tivo or not, I give him alot of credit for the company's success.
Thanks for that. It's nice to know where this all started, because... well, despite all of the talk and speculation, I don't see how it would make _any_ sense at all for Apple.
The true advantage TiVo has in the marketplace consist of (1) some patents on DVR tech and concepts, like Season Pass and such, (2) scheduling data to support that. Other than that, their service and tech are pretty straightforward things that almost any company ( or heck, open source project ) could duplicate with a bit of effort. This is why they haven't been bought out by Comcast or someone already ( that and, oh, they've said they don't _want_ to be bought ).
Anyway, while Steve is full of surprises, I don't really see where TiVo's services fit into Apple's game plan, unless Apple actually does have a handheld video device in it's plans. Personally, I don't think they do - Steve is right; except for the kids in the back of the mini van, I don't know many folks who wants to watch video on a portable. I'm not watching a bunch of movies on my laptop while I'm on vacation. Handheld video players aren't exactly flying off the shelves. Except via cable systems, we aren't yet approaching the bandwidth needed for even standard definition movie downloads at reasonable speeds. The market for TiVo-to-Go isn't really there, short of letting you burn DVDs of broadcast shows, which TiVo-to-Go doesn't do, and that's actually a pretty limited market, too. So why would Apple want to aquire a money-loosing division??
In short, buying TiVo makes way more sense for Microsoft than Apple, wouldn't it? But really, why would either company want to bother ? Wait a while and TiVo might actually end up being available for cheaper... or roll your own for cheaper... and I say that despite the fact that I frickin' love my TiVo.
Partnerships, sure, those make sense. But buying TiVo ? Why buy when you can partner and get TiVo-To-Go support for your platform ( the only thing Apple is likely to really be interested in ) for a whole heck of a lot less cash ???
What does TiVo do that Apple needs? Anyone who thinks TiVo's video capture capabilities, UI, or ability to download TV timetables automatically represent some kind of magic strategic advantage is smoking something. Apple has all of this now, what they don't have, TiVo doesn't have either.
The key component missing from TiVo's business model is something Apple has already done with music -- replaced broadcast with play on demand. (This is probably why iPods don't have FM tuners, even though they could be added for insignificant cost -- Steve Jobs/Apple is simply anti-broadcast as a concept. You decide what you download / rip and play, not some random DJ or corporation.)
Many of the companies Apple cut deals with to make iTunes Music Store possible are the same companies it would have to cut deals with to make Mac Mini Video Store possible.
TiVo's model in a nutshell: If it gets broadcast, we'll make it easier for you to watch, kind of. But because the legalities are iffy, we'll place some weird artificial restrictions on what you can do with the recorded material. We haven't changed the relationship between the consumer and the content producer -- advertising is still paying for the broadcast, but our profitability is in large part predicated on screwing the advertiser.
iTMS model translated to video: If you own it, we'll let you RIP it (or at minimum play it for you). If you don't own it, we'll let you download it for a reasonable fee (and maybe burn it). You pay for the content, not the advertiser, and not your cable company. You get exactly what you want, when you want it, not a rough approximation with ads you can kind of skip over.
You think Sony's Pictures division is going to be interested in supporting someone else's standard? I don't think so. 'Spiderman' is on it's way to a PSP near you but I'll be it would be a LONG time indeed before Jobs would be allowed to sell it.
Yes, it's probably just coincidence that the President of Sony appeared on stage with Jobs at the last MacWorld. He probably was just passing by and thought he'd stop in to say "Hi."
Does anyone really think that Apple would allow the TiVo hacking community to continue to flourish? And I doubt that they would permit "lifetime" service to continue to be available on hacked TiVos; you'ld have to download the inevitable Apple-ed-over TiVo software that would undoubtedly be hacker-unfriendly.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert