Business

Frost & Sullivan has recognized TiVo with its 2016 Global Frost & Sullivan Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award. Rovi’s acquisition of TiVo has enabled it to blend its strength in guides, advertising, and analytics with TiVo’s strength in over the top, on-demand user experience and content discovery. The company has reshaped its core competencies to create solutions that can restore service providers to a front-and-center role in consumer entertainment. TiVo is expected to continue its drive towards global expansion, extending its value proposition outside of Rovi’s traditional stronghold of North America. A significant opportunity is the growing demand for rich metadata solutions for European countries, where the combined company has its sights firmly set on establishing a wider, more diverse customer base.

“Acknowledging the consumer confusion caused by a profusion of data and fragmentation of content services, TiVo aims to restore engagement opportunities to operators through its unified entertainment system. This solution combines traditional Rovi’s metadata strengths with cross-service search to create a single portal for users to discover and browse TV episodes and movies across all accessible content services,” said Frost & Sullivan Industry Principal Avni Rambhia. “This feature, among others, is packed into TiVo’s current-generation DVR. Search results can be added to a cloud-based watch list, which can then be accessed from any other device.”

TiVo has the most comprehensive set of content engagement and discovery solutions in the market, including metadata, semantic search capabilities, personalized recommendations, and traditional electronic program guides (EPGs). The company also boasts customer reporting and audience segmentation capabilities coupled with usage analytics. Platform components can be deployed traditionally or in the cloud. This offers the infrastructural support necessary for operators to deliver experiences that are in line with today’s online-first, on-demand consumer expectations.

From operators such as Dish to CE device vendors such as Samsung, nearly every ecosystem player is a licensee of TiVo’s technology and intellectual property (IP) in some form. Underpinning its entrepreneurial pivot to full-fledged solutions, TiVo’s solid IP gives it a firm footing in the consumer video industry. As a result, TiVo is well positioned to partner with service providers in an evolving television ecosystem.

“TiVo’s position as a vendor that offers the trifecta of cross-service search and recommendation, metadata solutions, and unified consumption devices puts it in a blue-ocean space,” noted Rambhia. “Personalization of the consumer experience is possible by using data, analytics and insights to understand consumer engagement. In this scenario, TiVo has a large opportunity to differentiate itself and transform the media industry.”