After months of promoting various deals with TV manufacturers, the parent company of TiVo has finally started to ship smart TVs with its next-generation streaming operating system on store shelves in Europe.
This week, Xperi announced TVs made by partner manufacturer Vestel were now available to buy in the Czech Republic, where the sets sport the JVC brand that Vestel uses under license.
The TVs are among the first to debut with the new TiVo OS streaming platform, which Xperi built from the ground up. Like rival platforms offered by Roku and Amazon, TiVo OS offers access to popular streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus and YouTube while also incorporating a powerful content recommendation and personalization engine that made the TiVo brand name famous for several decades.
On a conference call with reporters and investors, Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner said the company recently signed its fourth agreement with a TV manufacturer who is willing to ship models with TiVo OS as the built-in streaming platform. To date, Xperi has only revealed two partners by name — Vestel is on, and the other is Sharp.
For now, Xperi appears focused on shipping TiVo OS-powered TVs in overseas markets. The company has been relatively quiet on whether those TVs and other devices running TiVo OS will be sold in North America. Stateside, Xperi offers a streaming dongle called the TiVo Stream 4K, which runs a variant of Android TV that includes a dedicated TiVo OS app.
On Monday, Xperi said it took a $31.1 million loss during the company’s third financial quarter of the year, down from a $399.1 million loss logged during the same period last year. Revenue increased to $130 million during Q3, up from $121.6 million reported in Q3 2022.
Xperi concentrates its efforts on building operating systems and related software for so-called “connected” devices, with a specific focus on streaming TV hardware and in-car entertainment systems. The company was spun off last year from a broader business called Xperi Holding Corporation that also included various patents and other intellectual property (IP); the IP business now operates as Adeia.
“Today’s results reflect the completion of our first year as a standalone company — a year highlighted by significant design wins and strong business momentum across our key growth areas, coupled with solid financial performance, including comparable 6 percent revenue growth over the prior year trailing twelve months,” Kirchner said on Monday.
He continued: “When taken together with ongoing efforts to drive cost transformation, these milestones are important steps toward delivering on our strategic vision, improving profitability, and achieving significant long-term revenue growth.”
That long-term strategy includes onboarding more free, ad-supported streaming channels into a section of TiVo OS called TiVo Plus, which operates similar to Paramount’s Pluto TV or Comcast’s Xumo Play. Xperi also wants to see more of its software incorporated in devices outside the home, with BMW set to debut video products that are powered by TiVo in its newer-model cars.