TiVo’s Pitch To Cable Operators

My recent post about small cable MSOs using TiVo reminded me of a page I noticed on TiVo’s site a while back and meant to post about. But looking at my old posts it doesn’t look like I ever did, so I am now. TiVo has a page for U.S. Cable Business which contains their marketing materials targeting MSOs. They have one-sheets for each of the three products targeted at the MSO market: TiVo Premiere, TiVo Premiere Q, and TiVo Preview.

There are no real revelations here, but I find it interesting how TiVo positions the products for the MSO market.

It is interesting that the Premiere and Q mention Amazon On Demand as one of the features. That would seem to indicate it is something MSOs could provide, yet they generally do not. I think they need someone to review these though, as the Premiere’s one-sheet states “Record four shows at once”, which is a Q feature only. So who knows, maybe the Amazon mention isn’t so meaningful?

The TiVo Preview sheet mentions YouTube only once, in the overview at the top. But I note that Charter’s recently published feature matrix for their Preview deployment indicates that YouTube is not supported on the Preview. A goof on TiVo’s document? I wouldn’t expect Charter to disable YouTube on the Preview if it is supported, since they enable it on the Premiere.

Between this one-sheet and Charter’s document it seems the Preview doesn’t support any OTT video streaming services – no YouTube or Hulu Plus. I wouldn’t expect Amazon or Blockbuster, since those are download services and the Preview doesn’t have any storage. And Netflix we know isn’t available for contractual reasons. I wonder if the Preview has an issue with Internet video streaming services, not enough memory for buffering? It just seems curious. I need to remember to ask about that at The Cable Show in May.

The Premiere and Q sheets also say “connected to the home network through Broadband”, which doesn’t make any sense, even in context. What they really meant, from context, seems to be “connected to the home network through Ethernet”. But that’s a minor, geeky nit to pick, I admit.

Oh, while I’m at it, another area of interest is the Partner & Affiliates resources page. There’s some really interesting stuff there, like the TiVo Sales & Install Guide, Brochures and Spec Sheets, screenshots, messaging for retailers to use in pitching TiVo’s products, etc. TiVo has a lot of interesting stuff squirreled away on their site, including documentation on their Network Remote Control Protocol.