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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]

A company called Inxstor, based in Scotland, received $1.2 million in funding for its TV place-shifting technology. Investors included Scottish venture firms Braveheart Ventures and the Scottish Co-investment Fund.

Inxstor was founded in 2006 as a spin-off from Infinite Data Storage.

It said it has already signed a deal with set-top box maker Pace Micro Technologies.

According to PaidContent:

“But Inxstor’s unique selling point is that it claims to be the only one of these that allows content to be accessed remotely in a secure way, writes the Scotsman.”

Competition will come from other place-shifting companies like Orb, a relative newcomer and Sling Media, which already has a huge market lead. Another new place-shifting company is CMWare, which announced in September 2006 that it received an undisclosed amount of funding.

From: Digital Media Wire and PaidContent.

[tags] Inxstore, Orb, Sling Media, Slingbox, CMWare, Place-Shifting, TV [/tags]