dvrbulletin.com

Fresh from announcing their acquisition to EchoStar, Sling Media announced a new lower-priced product called Solo. The solo works with SD and HD video and costs about $179.

Sling now has the basic Slingbox AV, the HD ready Slingbox Pro and now the Slingbox Solo.

Sling also announced a new version of its SlingPlayer Mobile software for Symbian OS smartphones, including the Nokia N95. Sling users can watch their TV on smartphones like Windows and Palm Treos, and now Nokia’s N95 running Symbian.

I think it’s worth mentioning that Sling Media went beyond its hardware roots and is starting an entertainment division called “Sling Media Entertainment Group”. It was officially announced last year, and there hasn’t been much news since.

A press release says: “It is Sling Media Entertainment Group’s mission to introduce solutions that delight the consumer and drive new value for content owners and distributors.”

There are multiple job postings in New York, where the entertainment division is headquartered. Plus the group is also spearheading Sling’s Clip+Sling application, which will allow users to create short clips of what they’re watching and trade them with other people over the Internet.

In November 2006, Sling hired two executives to head the entertainment group: Jason Hirschhorn and Benjamin White.

Essentially, the division is looking to create content and community around its Sling products. And why not. If you thought the Sling boxes were a disrupting technology, wait until Sling unveils their entertainment group and video sharing.

[tags] Solo, Sling, Sling Media, place shifting [\tags]

From the better late than never files…

I was just looking over Tivo’s financial results for the second quarter ending July 31, 2007 and saw some data on Tivo’s subscribers. It looks like Tivo is losing subscribers compared to a year ago.

“TiVo-Owned subscription gross additions for the second quarter were 41,000, compared to 74,000 gross additions for the year-ago period.”

During this past quarter, Tivo lost a net of 19,000 direct subscribers and 126,000 DirecTV subscribers for a grand total loss of 145,000 compared to a loss of 1,000 subscribers for the same period in 2006.

Tivo is losing DirecTV subscriptions because DirecTV has stopped marketing their DirecTivo service, so that’s not a big surprise. From Tivo’s results: “As expected, TiVo reported a net decline in DIRECTV TiVo subscriptions during the period as DIRECTV is no longer deploying new TiVo boxes.”

Interestingly, Tivo blamed the drop in subscriptions on a growing focus on HD sales, which essentially means customers were not buying HD Tivo DVRs or were choosing to go with the competition, such as cable or satellite HD DVRs. From the financial results: “As has been the case in recent quarters, gross subscription additions were impacted by the pace at which etailers moved to a high definition sales focus.”

On a cumulative basis, TiVo-owned subscriptions totaled 1.71 million, up 136,000 on an annual basis compared to last year.

However, total cumulative subscriptions (Tivo-owned and DirecTV) as of July 31, 2007 were 4.2 million, compared to 4.4 million in 2Q2006. That’s a drop of 221,000 cumulative subscribers from 2Q2006. Clearly, that loss is coming from DirecTV.

So the point? The DirecTV deal is costing Tivo overall customers, but somehow Tivo is managing to gain subscribers. So it’s somewhat good news, despite the drop in overall subscribers. And the numbers for this quarter don’t reflect sales from the newly unveiled lower priced Tivo HD which may help Tivo gain even more subscribers for the next reporting period.

[tags] Tivo, DVR [/tags]

Forbes has a pretty good article detailing how Apple got the new Apple TV device wrong, calling it an “iFlop”.

When Apple first announced a new living room device to stream and buy movies from your TV, people had high hopes. Apple’s iPod and iTunes work so well and have tremendously successful. How could Apple not get a next-gen TV device right?

Says Forbes:

“Six months later iTV is a flat-out iFlop. Renamed Apple TV upon launch, the ballyhooed box has sold perhaps 250,000 units–far behind the 1 million sold for the iPhone, which was priced twice as high and has been on the market less than half as long. Apple, which declined to let FORBES interview Jobs and other execs for this story, provides detailed sales data for the iPod and other digital wonders but won’t reveal any numbers for Apple TV; apparently the truth is too humiliating. A company spokesman declined to respond to written questions.”

Surprisingly. Jobs said at a May tech conference that the Apple TV was a “hobby” and even Apple isn’t giving much shelf space to Apple TV in their own stores. Apparently Apple has been trying to drive the price of its video downloads, much to the chagrin of the studios. Apple wants to sell movies for about $10, while the studios want $20 per download.

The movie studios got their way with Vudu, a start-up video download service, which allows users to rent movies for 24 hours (Apple TV has no rental option) and charges $20 for purchasing downloaded movies.
Apple also had problems pricing Apple TV.

According to the Forbes article:

“It wanted to keep the price low at $300, but that resulted in cheaping out on components. The first box had a tiny hard drive (40 gigabytes to store fewer than 50 hours at standard-definition TV resolution) and an older, slower Intel chip. Even then the box’s insides cost a total $237, says research firm Isuppli. That left a scant $62 in gross profit, or 20%, to be split by Apple and retailers (barely half Apple’s typical 37% gross margin). The stores went along, but when Apple TV faltered, they had even less incentive to push the new product.”

Worse yet, is Apple’s relationship with Hollywood. NBC Universal dropped plans to put its new Fall TV shows on iTunes and switched to Amazon. Again, the issue was pricing—NBC wanted higher prices, while Apple stood firm on its price.

Bonus: Unfortunately, Forbes requires free registration to read their articles online. Try BugMeNot to get access to free user names and passwords for sites that require free registration.

[tags] Apple, Apple TV, Vudu [/tags]

On Monday, EchoStar announced it was acquiring place-shifting company Sling Media for $380 million. Although many people expected Sling Media to be acquired, it seems many were shocked that it happened so soon.

Sling was one a pioneer place-shifting company, makers of the Slingbox. The device connects to the TV/cable box/DVR and lets users watch their TV shows anywhere there’s a broadband connection. A new feature, called Clip and Sling, allows users to create clips of their favorite TV shows and share them with friends.
The relationship between EchoStar and Sling go back a few years since EchoStar was an early investor. And teaming with Echostar means that Sling now has  deeper pockets. Says GigaOm:

Sling has established a nice brand, but in order to grow further the company needs deep pockets of a corporate master.

Meanwhile, EchoStar just asked the Internal Revenue Service if it can separate its technology and infrastructure assets by forming a spin off. The Sling acquisition will fall into the spinout.

You may also recall that EchoStar is in the middle of a lawsuit with Tivo. Tivo filed a lawsuit against EchoStar in 2004 saying that the operator of the satellite-based DISH Network, was infringing on its DVR patent.

Overall, I’d bet that Tivo is miffed now that EchoStar owns Sling. A combination of Tivo and Sling would have been a killer combination since many customers already own both a Tivo DVR and a Slingbox.

So some questions:

• Will EchoStar continue to allow Sling’s place-shifting from non-EchoStar devices?
• Will innovation be stifled at Sling now that it’s owned by a major provider?
• Will Sling move to a more ad-based model?

Sony said that it is dropping support from regular DVDs from its DVRs and only supporting its Blu-Ray format. This is for their upcoming DVR lines in Japan.

Dropping support for DVDs means that consumers will have to upgrade and buy the new Blu-Ray discs if they want to archive shows that they’ve recorded. Now that’s great news for those looking to store more movies in each disc and good news for the growing number of HDTV users. But it’s bad news for people still clinging to their DVD collections.

Coolest Gadgets says that support Blu-Ray offers much more storage:

“[a] …50GB Blu-ray disc is capable of holding slightly more than 4 hours of HDTV whenever one records over-the-air MPEG2 stream, but transcoding this stream to MPEG4 AVC makes it possible to cram in up to 16 hours of HDTV onto the same disc. “

It will probably also raise prices since the new recordable HD drives are more expensive than regular DVD recordable drives. I guess it’s great that Sony is very forward thinking, but here in the U.S. many people are still using regular DVDs and haven’t made the transition to HD discs.

But what about support for HD-DVD? Looks like the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is heating up.

Somehow this bit of news slipped past lots of people. The San Jose Mercury News said that Tivo founder and former CEO Michael Ramsay left the board of directors on August 30 to become a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates.

Zatz Not Funny said there’s probably not much to this departure, since it happens all the time. That’s probably true. Tivo is pretty well on its own and doesn’t need Ramsay, although apparently he will consult with Tivo. But details are shaky.

Says the Merc:

“Ramsay had stepped aside as CEO two years ago at the much-loved but perpetually financially shaky digital video recorder pioneer. But the details of his leaving are a bit, well, thin. In the filing, the company simply notes that it signed a “consulting and transition” agreement with Ramsay and that it expects to ”incur approximately $3 million in non-cash stock-based compensation expense in connection with the agreement.”

According to research from Ofcom, U.K.’s communications regulator, over 75% of people using time-shifting in the U.K. say they always or almost always fast forward through commercials. The study looked at both DVR users and other time-shifted viewing.

More specifically, Ofcom found that 40% of DVR users fast forward through commercials regularly, while 58% have ever done it.

This goes against what many surveys in the U.S. claim: that people are more interested in time-shifting rather than skipping commercials.

For example, research from the Liechtmann Group found that just 8% of DVR users say the ability to skip commercials is the main benefit of owning a DVR.

And another story from the NY Times recently reported that DVR owners watch about 40% of commercials.

Informitv says:

“The latest research by Ofcom…confirms anecdotal accounts, suggesting that skipping commercials is much more popular than the television industry tends to admit.”

The numbers are just everywhere on this.

So what about the anecdotal evidence? I always ask people I know if they skip through commercials and many say they never watch them. Researchers, however, say the opposite? Who do we believe? Who can advertisers believe? Can someone provide a definitive answer?

Bonus: Go to Ofcom’s site to download the report, which is split into about three different PDFs.

Bonus #2: Additionally, Ofcom found that 15% of U.K. homes have a DVR either through Sky+, V+ or Freeview DVR.

[tags] Ofcom, DVR, PVR, digital video recorder, advertising, Tivo, research [/tags]