TiVo CEO Tom Rogers has said he expects the personal video recorder company will maintain its relationship with Virgin Media, despite the sale of the cablenet to Liberty Global.
Liberty has developed its own Horizon platform in partnership with Samsung, Intel and NDS-Cisco, and is in the process of rolling out the technology across its UPC footprint.
But Rogers pointed to the 1.4 million customers that Virgin has added to its TiVo count over the last 12 months: “Virgin is doing dramatically well with TiVo,” he said. “As the Virgin Media offering evolves we believe even more fans of TV in the U.K. will seek out our unique offering.”
Liberty Global president Mike Fries has also found a new enthusiasm for the technology he had once spurned.
TiVo reported higher than expected losses following a series of legal actions. The $15.8 million loss was alongside the highest quarterly Service & Technology revenues ever at of $65.7 million (€12.08 million).
TiVo has outstanding litigation with Motorola, Cisco and Time Warner.
Rogers confirmed that the Com Hem deployment in Sweden is currently in the early stages of testing with a full rollout expected later in the year. “Com Hem is a perfect example of how operators are beginning to embrace new IPTV video delivery options across their networks and how TiVo can take them beyond the set-top box to provide a best-in-class experience through virtually any type of video delivery and on any type of device. The full IPTV multi-screen experience we are developing for Com Hem is one we expect more operators will be extremely interested in deploying as their infrastructures are upgraded and enhanced,” said Rogers.
Music service Spotify has recently been added to the TiVo interface and the TiVo Mini thin-client set-top box already available to operators will shortly enter US retail.
