InteractiveTV Today (itvt) recently interviewed Tara Maitra, VP and General Manager of Content Services at TiVo. Tara is in charge of TiVo’s broadband strategy – TiVoCast, Unbox, YouTube, Rhapsody, etc. – so the interview is worth reading in its entirety. But there are some tidbits that caught my eye in particular:
Of the 1.7 million broadband-enabled TiVo boxes that have been deployed in consumers’ homes, approximately 800,000 are actually connected to a broadband pipe. Over a period of a little more than a year, those 800,000 boxes have generated over 20 million downloads.
So just under half of TiVo standalone boxes that are capable of being connected to broadband are. I believe that percentage has been steadily increasing over time. That 20 million downloads is an average of 25 per box per year. I easily average better than 25 *per week* with all of the TiVoCasts and TiVo Web Video downloads I subscribe to.
And this is some interesting info relating to the YouTube deployment on TiVo:
We’re working on developing the technology infrastructure for this now, and the feature should be available sometime this summer. From a technology perspective, implementing this feature requires us to enable streaming on TiVo devices–which is something that we have not supported previously. So this YouTube capability will be our first foray into enabling streaming through the TiVo service.
I think that one of the major payoffs for the YouTube addition will be the basic foundation for streaming on TiVo. Hopefully this ability will finally allow streaming between TiVos (hinted at by Tom Rogers recently) as well as support for other streaming services like Amazon’s planned Unbox streaming, and perhaps Netflix’s streaming.
If you have any interest in TiVo’s broadband content offerings, you should read the full interview.
