Tivo Gets New Funding, Sales Up

from the will-they-make-it? dept

I'm still a big fan of Tivo and hope they do survive. Apparently, sales were way up this holiday season, and many stores couldn't keep them in stock. Tivo also announced that they've received some new funding that should help them stay in business a little longer. I've been hearing that Tivo is offering all sorts of ridiculous promos and that you can even get the boxes for free in some cases... so I'm not sure how big a deal the increased sales are. Of course, the funny thing is all the analysts seem to care about is subscription numbers, so if I were Tivo I'd be giving all the boxes away for next to nothing to encourage more people to sign up.
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  • identicon
    dot, 27 Dec 2001 @ 6:57am

    DirecTV & Tivo

    I bought a Hughes Electronics DirecTV/Tivo 35 hour Combo unit for $94 (Circuit City). I unboxed, signed up, and had it recording in under 30 minutes. Why wouldn't anyone want one of these things?!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    msykes, 27 Dec 2001 @ 1:49pm

    TiVo vs. Hardware...

    The thing to remember here is that TiVo is a software company, which makes it a little trickier to give away hardware boxes which are made by Sony and Phillips (for cable based TiVos) and others.

    TiVo makes all their money from subscriptions, but Sony etc make the money from hardware. This doesn't change your point, of course TiVo wants as many boxes out there as possible, but the hardware guys want some cash too so unless TiVo subsidizes it won't be free.

    I guess the DirectTiVos are much cheaper since they dont' require their own Tuners or something like that, but the stand alone units still run over a couple hundred bucks.

    If anyone can actually show me how to get one of these rumored free TiVos that is not a DirectTV unit I'd love to see it!

    msykes

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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