“DVR and video on demand are struggling for relevance today. The challenge that TiVo faces — the challenge that any device based service faces -– is how they’re going to address user behavior. For every one person who plans ahead to tape shows they’ll miss, there are nine other that want to go online now that they’ve missed it.”
Tivo made a name for itself with a set-top box that performed magic: at the touch of a remote you could pause the present, slip into the past or leap over ads into the future. Now, the future of the company which defined the DVR is likely to depend on dumping the magic box altogether.
The eleven-year-old DVR company was so universally loved on its entrance into the marketplace that it got to date a character from "Sex and the City."
And yet Tivo’s stock has been languishing at or below $6 for months, it has only a 10 percent share of the DVR market and its market cap ($619 million) is so low that any one of our nation’s beloved moguls could buy the company for some loose pocket change.
Only 3.6 million of the nation's 36.2 million DVR users in the U.S. are willing to fork over $300 for three years of Tivo service.
Why? Because the Tivo box is dying. WIRED Blog Net has the rest of this story.