The Future Of Television

Talk to me about TiVo not as a company, but as an idea

. TiVo owners are passionate about their TiVos. Why does the cult of TiVo command such power?

The insider language around this is, Oh my God, we've created a monster. It's apparent we've got this compelling consumer proposition. At the end of the day, it has to do with fact that people are discovering they can be in control of television and, more broadly, can be in control of their home entertainment. It's not until you discover what you can do that you realize how much a slave you were to the old way.Television has a bad rep, it's kind of broken4. When you have 500 channels and there's nothing on, television is definitely broken. I think what TiVo has done is put people back in charge. And that's a primal, important thing that people like as far as a social trend that's far broader than television. And when you give them that empowerment, they get very excited and love it. And so you get a statement like, its changed my life. I can never go back. That's a huge motivator for us as a company.

Do you have any favorite stories or testimonials5 from people about their TiVos?We hear all sorts of stories, mostly around kids. The fact you can manage kids' television viewing much more effectively. It doesn't get in the way of the family being able to sit down and have a meal together. That's where the lifestyle thing begins to build. When you're a slave to television it screws up your life. 6 My car has a TiVo license plate, so I get messages under my windshield wipers, people saying, I love TiVo. We get mail from people who send us the TiVo remote because their dog chewed it and they want a replacement. And we take these and put them in a trophy7 case. You get this cross-section of humanity and how they interact with their TiVos.

Do you think TiVo is part of a bigger cultural wave of consumer empowerment?

I know people who react that way. The PC revolution empowered people; it gave them a tool to do things on their own creatively. They didn't have to go ask permission of anyone. The Internet gave us access to infinite amounts of customized information. Google8 is an incredible personalization engine for all the information in the world,

essentially. TiVo has been about empowering people to be in charge of their own entertainment choices. We've taken that idea developing over the past 10 or 20 years, and I do think it's caused a social change where people expect if they want to do something or change something, they just go and do it. They don't have to wait in line or ask permission.

We're extending that idea into the television world. And we're extending it beyond television because of the work we're doing with music and pictures. Our software lets you stream music from your PC to your TiVo to play it on your stereo system, and also the ability to show digital photographs.

What's your vision for Internet television?

For us, it's a natural idea to consider that the DVR'idea would be extended beyond broadcast onto broadband10. We're in this space today where the availability of content over the Internet is starting to explode, starting with audio content and increasingly going to video content. But there's no real good technology for delivering that to the most ubiquitous11 Ul12 there is, which television is. We see our role as providing that delivery because we have a television-based platform. It's not a PC, it's not a Web browser, and its a true set-top box13. The opportunity we like is the marriage of what TiVo does from an Ulf standpoint with the availability of content that can be delivered over broadband14. Realistically, five years down the road, when you sit down to watch television, a good chunk of it will come over broadband.

by: Kinhomchan

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