After making their mark in Europe, Xperi says its TiVo-powered smart TVs are about ready to make their debut in the United States.
On Tuesday, Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner said the company has signed a seventh smart TV manufacturing partner that will begin shipping TiVo-powered smart TV sets in the United States in early 2025.
The name of the manufacturing partner was not revealed by Kirchner, though he did say the company was one of the top five suppliers of smart TVs in the United States. Xperi has a close relationship with Chinese smart TV maker TCL, which licenses certain intellectual property from its TiVo business and which manufactures smart TVs that utilize third-party operating systems like Roku and Google’s Android TV.
Three months ago, Kirchner told investors Xperi had a goal of having TiVo-powered TV sets in retail stores by the end of 2024. The new timeframe suggests Xperi either had difficulties finding a partner willing to license TiVo OS for its smart TV sets, or problems finding retailers who were willing to sell them.
In the United States, Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV are the dominant streaming video platforms, capturing more than 80 percent of the marketplace. (Roku has a slight lead, according to new data from Parks Associates that was released over the weekend.) For that reason, Xperi has largely concentrated its efforts on developing and shipping a smart TV operating system that can compete overseas, where the streaming market is just starting to mature.
In Europe, TV and film fans are still partial to cable and satellite services, with set-top boxes offering access to third party apps like Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and Disney Plus where available. But as more content shifts toward streaming, European TV viewers are shifting their attention and money accordingly, with subscription-based platforms seeing an uptick in adoption and cable and satellite companies experiencing the same trend of “cord-cutting” that they do in the U.S., albeit at a slower rate.
The slower adoption means new companies have had an easier time getting their devices to market and seeing them adopted compared to the United States, where the winners have largely been chosen. Android TV remains a popular option for streaming TV users in Europe, but Xperi has had no trouble finding customers for its TiVo-powered sets, with six TV makers shipping over 2 million active devices to date, Kirchner said.
Xperi says its TiVo TVs are better than the rest because they leverage TiVo’s popular content curation and recommendation engine to offer more-personalized suggestions for TV shows and movies to watch across partner services. The platform serves up many of the same popular apps as other services, though a full list of what will be offered in the United States was not readily available, and it isn’t clear if Xperi has opened up app development to third parties, as Roku, Amazon, Apple and Google have.
