Virgin Media’s director of consumer platforms has given details on the improvements made by the cablenet to its implementation of TiVo.
“There were too many buttons on the early remotes and in the early days people were trying to integrate it too much with the previous platform,” Ian Mecklenburgh told the DTG Summit.
Mecklenburgh said the introduction of TiVo had resulted in the lowest churn the operator had ever had; when asked 60% of consumers said TiVo had brought them more content that had been previously available.
Asked if Virgin would continue with TiVo after its acquisition by Liberty Global – which has made considerable investment in its own Horizon platform – Mecklenburgh was ambiguous. “There is the development work for Horizon, but its horse for courses and there are the 1.5 million TiVo boxes that will give weight for some time.”
Earlier in the same session Simon McGrath, general manager, Europe, thePlatform – one of the companies involved in the online version of Horizon – highlighted the importance of authenticating metadata in devices in a way that offers protection for the studios and makes money for the operators.
“What I want as a consumer is to know that if it is available elsewhere, if the kids have recorded a previous series and if there’s a movie available,” he said. “This is going to come as we harmonise the metadata from a number of content providers”.
The greater opportunity, said McGrath, was to find the content appeals to you be it through just linking of content or recommendation and personalisation.
