TiVo Incorporated: Digital Video Recorder - Essay Example

Introduction
What the TiVo Company is contributing to the society and economy
Essentially, what TiVo offers is exclusive and unlimited entertainment to its users. TiVo pioneered recording programs concurrent with household viewing habits. In this program as opposed to the others, users can rate programs from three “thumbs up” to three “thumbs down” profiling. These ratings are combined to create a recommendation for its viewers. TiVo has also increased its broadband features. This has included and been facilitated by Amazon Video on Demand, Jaman.com, and Netflix Watch Instantly. The advantage of this is that it provides users with unlimited access to thousands of movie titles and television shows from their homes. Perhaps the greatest contribution to the viewer’s society and the television industry is by having parental features. This way, the rate of pornography and violent co0ntent is greatly reduced as the parents get to choose what shows their children will watch. In a way, therefore, TiVo is actively involved in raising a responsible generation.

TiVo recently announced its intentions to acquire Digital smiths, a leading cloud-based content discovery service. The service which allows Pay-TV operators to deliver an advanced user experience integrating search, discovery, and browsing across a variety of devices will only mean more subscriptions to TiVo (Daft 120). Economically, these will translate to increased returns to scale for this market pacesetter. The devices include Android, Roku, Xbox, Playstation, Kindle, and multiple other set-top boxes.

TiVo also announced that it has increased its stock repurchase authorization by $100 million and intended to repurchase its $100 million in the first quarter of the 2015 fiscal year. In spite of having gained 234000 subscribers in the last quarter of 2011, TiVo had roughly 2.3 million subscribers in January 2012 in the United States. This marked a significant decrease from the subscribers at a similar period in 2006. The main economic contribution to the economy is by their tax compliancy, acquisition, and merger with other stakeholders. To the average consumer, TiVo provides cost-effective entertainment which is also diverse.

Competitors
TiVo’s main competitor in the United States was Replay TV. After lawsuits against it due to its commercial skip feature, it went to the bankruptcy of its mother company Sonic blue, and Replay TV's eventual acquisition by DNA. The other distributors who are competing for DVR sets in the United States now are namely Comcast and Verizon. They however distribute third-party hardware drawn from manufacturers such as Motorola and the former Scientific Atlanta unit of Cisco Systems. TiVo also holds several patents which have been asserted against cable TV operators and competing DVR box makers. TiVo’s market competitiveness can be drawn from its unique features and its large market infiltration in many countries (Daft 121). There have however been fears by media stakeholders about advertisements that have led to its operations being banned in places like Singapore. Media houses in countries like Australia have addressed this by doing business with TiVo. Plans to better the development, as explained above, have been extended. As a result, newer models have adopted the Cable Card standard that limits the availability of certain features and is currently available in the United Kingdom.