Call me what you want, but I think that TiVo’s future looks promising. Often times we (meaning the community) get caught up in the media’s hype about TiVo going under. This post is meant to point out some promising items in TiVo’s future. I put a similar post together back in March ‘05 when everybody was “digging” TiVo’s grave.

• Comcast Deal: TiVo has repeatedly said that the Comcast deal is going strong. Comcast is the largest cable company in the country so once this deal goes through you are going to see a lot more TiVo subscribers.
• Series 3 TiVo: The Series 3 TiVo looks really promising. I know that we’ve been waiting for a long time however, the specs are pretty amazing. We’ll have to wait and see how much it goes for but I know that if it is cheap enough I’ll pick one up.
• Financial Situation: TiVo’s financial situation continues to improve. The most recent press release (PDF) shows that TiVo is improving financially and that the company is on the way to a sound financial future.
  

  TiVo achieved its first positive cash flow from operations in fiscal 2006. For the year, TiVo reported a net loss of ($34.4) million and net loss per share of ($0.41), a 57% and 59% improvement respectively, compared to a net loss of ($79.8) million, or ($0.99) per share in fiscal 2005. For the fourth quarter, TiVo reported a net loss of ($19.5) million and net loss per share of ($0.23), a 42% and 45% improvement respectively, compared to a net loss of ($33.7) million, or ($0.42) per share, for the fourth quarter of last year.

• Features: What other company do you know that continues to provide new features at almost no cost to the customer. For example, look at the following new features that TiVo has rolled out of the past year (or so): TiVoToGo, TiVo Desktop (HMO) updates, HME, Yahoo & TiVo partnership, Overlap protection, TiVo Central Online update. These are just a few of the features that have been released or updated recently. The list goes on and on.
• Growth: Even with everybody digging TiVo’s grave, the subscriber base has grown by 45% over the past year! Not to bad!

I hope that these 5 points make you realize that TiVo’s future isn’t all that bad. In my opinion, the company is stronger now then ever!

Several people are reporting a problem where by their TiVo is reducing the recording time of certain shows for no apparent reason. Could this be a bug in TiVo’s new overlap projection feature? It’s hard to say but it sure does look like overlap projection may be causing the problem.

My wife just told me that she has seen this problem as well. Now that I’m having the problem, I would like to find a solution ;). A couple of people have said that turning off overlap protection fixes the problem. If you are having this problem, head on over to TiVo’s support forum and get in on the discussion. I’m going to try turning off overlap projection so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks David: via the feedback form.