Xperi has signed a sixth television manufacturer to build and deploy its TiVo-powered smart TVs, which will help it deploy 2 million TiVo smart TVs by the end of the year, the company affirmed last week.
The new comes more than a year after Xperi inked agreements with several smart TV makers, including Vestel, to build and ship its TiVo-powered smart TVs in Europe, with the first wave of those TVs hitting store shelves last year.
“We want to see TVs powered by TiVo in all five major European countries and in the U.S. market by year-end,” Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner said on a conference call with investors. “Our partners are currently shipping into most of the largest European countries and continue to expand. In addition, our plans to launch in the U.S. market remain on track for later this year. We have a goal to exit 2024 with at least six TV partners and an active TV OS footprint of 2 million devices.”
Kirchner declined to name the sixth electronic maker that had signed on to incorporate TiVo OS into smart TVs, only to say that they were based in Japan and that “negotiations with additional TV partners are progressing and our TiVo OS footprint is expected to accelerate as we move through the year.” Kirchner said additional details will be revealed during the company’s second quarter (Q2) conference call in three months.
For the first quarter (Q1) of 2024, Xperi brought in $119 million in revenue from its media platforms business, which includes TiVo’s consumer electronics and enterprise-focused products. Revenue was down 6 percent when compared to the same quarter in 2023.
Xperi has been laser-focused on incorporating its TiVo OS into more smart TVs as it works to build out the streaming operating system into one that can compete against Amazon Fire TV and Android TV primarily in overseas markets. It has offered little information on how TiVo OS expects to compete in the U.S., where Fire TV and Roku OS are the dominant and more-mature platforms.
TiVo continues to offer a line of its own digital video recorders in the U.S., along with an Android TV dongle called TiVo Stream 4K. While both devices contain elements of TiVo OS, they are different from the operating system, which leverages TiVo’s proprietary content recommendation engine to deliver personalized results to streamers across partner services.
Xperi also ships its TiVo Stream 4K dongle and two other Android TV devices as a white-label solution for pay TV companies that are looking to offer streaming TV gear to their broadband-only customers.
TiVo’s IPTV solution reached more than 2 million customers during Q1, Xperi executives affirmed, and its TiVo Broadband solution — those white-label streaming devices offered to pay TV customers — allows Xperi to grow the reach of its own free, ad-supported streaming TV platform called TiVo Plus, which generates ancillary revenue from the sale of advertisements against free streaming content.
“We have the ability to monetize the viewing of that content in partnership with our operator customers who recognize that video services remain a key offering to support higher per subscriber ARPU and lower customer churn,” Kirscher said.
During Q1, TiVo Broadband added three new service providers to its client list, including Buckeye Broadband, Midco and Bluepeak, bringing the total number of cable ISPs using TiVo Broadband products to seven and representing “a serviceable available footprint of more than 1 million U.S. households for potential monetization,” Kirchner affirmed.
