Dave Zatz recently pointed out that TiVo is advertising and selling Slingboxes through its website advertising them as an additional device to compliment your TiVo. For those of you that don't know a Slingbox allows you to stream recorded TV shows and control and watch your TV over the internet effectively allowing you to take your living room TV with you.
Dave Zatz did a bit of digging and found that the promotion of Slingboxes on the TiVo website was nothing more than a minor "co-sales agreement" between TiVo and Slingmedia.
Placeshifting TV shows over the net is actually something that I thought TiVo would like to get into themselves adding the functionality to its own PVRs. But it seems that TiVo obviously has no plans for creating a placeshifting TiVo since it is already giving the Slingbox some nice exposure and sales via its own website.
It just wouldn't make sense for TiVo to promote a product that it had an intention of competing with in the future, so I think as it stands now TiVo has no plans for adding Slingbox placeshifting to its PVRs, unless of course there is some sort of buyout or merger on the horizon...
1. Adding placeshifting to the TiVo would add cost - you need dedicated hardware to do what the Slingbox does. Basically you need - well, the hardware in the Slingbox. :-) There could be some synergy, but you still need new hardware. Since placeshifting is still a very small market, smaller than the DVR market, it doesn't make a lot of sense for TiVo to up the cost of their hardware to add it. Or to introduce more models, some with placeshifting, some without. It makes more sense for them to partner with the market leader in placeshifting - Sling Media. It is possible that they could more tightly integrate their products in the future if the market grows. And it could go as far as a buyout or merger. TiVo did it before - they bought Strangeberry, which gave them the foundation for HME. (Though I don't know if they really got the full value from that buyout.)
However, companies have long cross-promoted products from other vendors, only to later turn around and launch their own products that do the same thing. It happens all the time in the computer and networking world. For example, storage devices, a lot of the 'big names' OEM'd storage solutions and once the market was large enough they developed their own to keep more of the revenue in house. So TiVo could always decide to do it on their own later - though I doubt it.
Posted at 12:06PM on Jan 7th 2007 by MegaZone