DirecTV Dumps TiVo
DirecTV announced Friday that it will stop marketing TiVo as its digital video recorder service, opting to market its own DVR after a long troubled relationship between the satellite TV giant and the flagship digital video recorder. DirecTV announced earlier this year that it would begin selling its own DVR alongside TiVo, but this is the first time the company stated that it would stop promoting TiVo. Subscribers can still order TiVo until February 2007, but they’ll have to ask for the service specifically.
This could mean bad news for TiVo - 2.1 of TiVo’s 3.3 million subscribers came from DirecTV, and in the three months ending April 30th, 77 percent of TiVo’s new subscribers were DirecTV subscribers. But TiVo has already struck deals with Comcast and the National Cable Television Cooperative, which respresents 1,000 independent cable operators across the country, for a total of 35.5 million potential new subscribers.