TiVo quietly confirmed to Cord Cutter News on Monday that, as of last week, it has officially halted the sale and manufacture of its once-revolutionary DVR products.
Which raises an obvious, albeit uncomfortable question: What does TiVo even do anymore, anyway?
Believe me, I empathize. I wrote for MTV News over a decade ago, and if we’d earned a nickel every time somebody asked us, “Whatever happened to Kurt Loder?” then maybe the brand would still be in operation today.
But TiVo (and, by extension, its parent company, Xperi) is trying to earn its nickels in a far more sustainable fashion – by leaning into its B2B capabilities. Over the past 15 years, the company has repositioned its business to provide software to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), ad inventory to marketers and data to measurement providers.
Talk about diversifying your portfolio.
About the ads
Let’s talk about the advertising business first.
TiVo One, the company’s cross-screen advertising platform, reaches 15 million households via TiVo-branded operating systems on TVs and connected cars.
But rather than produce the hardware itself, TiVo is now letting its OEM and multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) partners handle consumer-facing relationships, Craig Chinn, SVP of advertising sales, told me when we caught up during Advertising Week in New York City. This gives TiVo the time to focus on managing content discovery and developing relevant ad formats.
The sales pitch is that TiVo’s data and ad units – which also include spots in interactive program guides licensed by other cable providers – are unique to TiVo. Advertisers like hearing about unduplicated reach, Chinn said.
But, like many other OS developers, TiVo is selective about what type of brands are allowed to advertise on its home screen, sticking mostly to media and entertainment properties. Down the line, though, according to Chinn, TiVo may consider including nonendemic verticals, like travel or lifestyle, but the ad creative would need to fit the experience without feeling disruptive.
“The relationship you have with your TV is really important,” said Chinn. “If you are going to place an ad there, there’s a responsibility to make sure the ad has good content.”
About the data
But back to the data – TiVo has a lot of it, not just related to TV viewership but also metadata about the content of the programming itself, including everything from show titles to airdates.
Although it’s often undervalued, metadata is critically important to the TV advertising ecosystem, said Fariba Zamaniyan, global VP of data monetization. Without complete information about what’s airing in local markets, for example, it becomes nearly impossible to accurately measure TV viewership in a way that advertisers and publishers can use to plan campaigns and track impressions.
A lot of TiVo’s metadata comes from partnerships with broadcasters and publishers, some of which were originally struck by TiVo’s former parent company, Rovi, a specialist in interactive program guides. Some of TiVo’s other metadata comes from crowdsourced material, such as the The Movie Database, which was also bought by Rovi back in 2014 and still belongs to TiVo today.
But despite having access to all this data, TiVo isn’t looking to compete with measurement providers; it’s working with them. TiVo announced a partnership with HyphaMetrics in September to integrate its metadata into Hypha’s panel. And it struck a similar deal earlier this week to integrate its metadata into Comscore’s audience measurement system.
Going forward, Zamaniyan told me she believes the increased availability of reliable data sources will help the CTV industry overcome the challenges posed by content fragmentation.
Which would be good news for TiVo. After all, digital video recording technology is what started fragmenting the TV landscape in the first place. Wouldn’t it be funny if it was TiVo that helped get us all back on the same page again?
