Virgin Media’s COO has defended the relatively slow rollout of applications onto the next generation platform, arguing that the cablenet would keep to heavyweight apps and not just fodder.
TiVo currently has 15 apps, compared to 12 in August, but Andrew Barron said apps would launch on a gradual basis.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world, because it runs in Flash to publish all sorts of stuff to it, but that’s not consistent with the TiVo environment, we want the Twitters and the Facebooks and the iPlayers”.
Barron added that apparent delays to the introduction of the iPad app were because the company wanted to have an app that was good enough for primetime with enough to satisfy the customer base as a whole, rather than just the early adopters. A beta was currently working and Barron said he was using it himself.
“There is a fundamental difference between what we’re trying to do with TiVo and what a lot of other people around the industry are doing. We are an open platform, we carry Spotify, we were iPlayer’s founder and largest distributor, we’re Sky’s largest distributor for premium content”
Barron likened the growing availability of applications to the growth in digital TV channels some ten years ago: “We embrace some of those over the top applications, many of which run in Flash on TiVo, and then we offer consumers the power to access an ever increasing range of applications”.
Addressing the development of Virgin’s TiVo platform against a background of growing HD penetration, chief executive Neil Berkett said that ultimately all of the cablenet’s customers would be on the TiVo platform. “In five years time we’ll retire Liberate, in five years time our customers will be exclusively on TiVo, and I’m sure we’ll then be considering the son of TiVo”.
