Tuesday 24 July 2012

25% of Virgin Media's TV customers have TiVo; iPad app coming in late 2012?

Virgin Media's 2nd quarter results for 2012 are in, and the TiVo invasion of the Digital Cable TV network continues with 938,800 customers getting TiVoed - that figure is due to reach 1 million this week. 25% of Virgin's TV customer base now has Virgin's next-gen PVR. Despite the fact that the monthly TiVo fee (now included in the Collections packages) increased from £3 to £5 per month, the take-up for TiVo increased compared to the previous quarter.

But what about the impending threat from YouView? Virgin Media CEO Neil A. Berkett doesn't seem to concerned about that:

TiVo is a significantly superior product to the impending YouView. It has far greater intelligence search, recommendation, and discovery tools, which means that our customers wherein combined with a far greater array of content whether that be free, over the top, or pay will have a significantly superior product and well-priced and well positioned as part of our essentials 25 pound bundle.

TiVo braces over the top applications and clearly these are distributed by a dedicated IP pipe. Separate from the dedicated IP pipe or spectrum such as video on demand, separate from the broadcast taking advantage of our connectivity advantage.

And the iPad app? Where the heck is it?
We have an exciting product roadmap ahead of us with the next step being the launch of iPad companion app with live streaming in the fourth quarter....that will ultimately move to a full application across multiple devices.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

It's a bit rich for Berkett to claim that TiVo embraces apps when all they have beyond iPlayer is Spotify and a bunch of ads.

When TiVo has Netflix, LoveFilm, Now TV, Crackle, Crunchy Roll, Last FM, 4OD, Vimeo, Blinkbox, and MUBI, then he can say he's embracing apps.

Jason (Admin) said...

I would love all those apps on TiVo. My gut feeling is that they'll show up first on YouView.


And if I see one more movie promotional app on TiVo, I'll scream. Shame I have to rely on my Xbox to stream actual movies to my TV via Lovefilm and Netflix.

Unknown said...

Does the Cisco and Sammy Virgin boxes have the horsepower to transcode video to h.264 for the iPad or will the "live streaming" in the fourth quarter require an external TiVo Stream box on the network?

Unknown said...

Does the Virgin TiVo boxes have the CPU-power to transcode MPEG-2 video to h.264 for live streaming on the iPad or will a TiVo Stream box connected to the network be required?

Phill said...

so does that mean streaming is comming? What about tivo - tivo or tivo -vm hd box ( I read somewhere that this might be tivoified)

Believe in what you are. said...

I think it's a bit of a libaty take putting the price up from £3 to £5. I just want to watch and record what I did on my v plus box, I don't care if it records other stuff for me, I don't have time to watch it and when I do it's not worth watching, virgin are getting fare to pricy for a lot of folk, me for on is thinking of going over to bt vision, they have good selection of free tv,
Virgin have added nothing to TiVo worth having, the hdmi should already be stable, YouTube, I use my apple tv and iPad, I watch Netflix on apple tv, music well I just watch a music channel, if I get a letter saying they will e putting my price up then it's good by virgin!

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