The announcement yesterday (WSJ, USA Today) that TiVo and Verizon are partnering to enable customers to schedule recording shows from your phone was met with a collective “huh?” and not because it’s a bad idea. It’s a bad execution of a good idea.
According to the WSJ article, TiVo Mobile will be enabled by a small software program that Verizon customers will pay around $5 a month for, on top of their existing TiVo subscription. I guess they’re going for the stupid rich segment, because you can already schedule your recordings for no extra fee via a web interface. Let’s say you already use a mobile optimizing service on your phone, why exactly would you pay another $60/year to do the same thing? To use a specialized application? Michael Parekh calls this “a pointless deal” and adds:
You sometimes wonder why companies like Tivo even bother expending the time, energy and resources to craft such partnerships. Most of these high-priced services are stillborn from the very start for ordinary, mainstream customers. They make for great press releases and little else.
The reason this is so sad for TiVo is that, with 4 million subscribers, they only have a little more than a third of the subscription PVR market and they are fighting tooth and nail fending off competition. They’re clearly not thinking that mobile access, which TiVo’s chief executive Tom Rogers claims users have “hungered” for, is anything more than a tool for extracting more fees from their existing customer base, who are (I shall now forever assume) the stupid rich. If potential subscribers are hungering for mobile TiVo access, then TiVo should give it away. On the other hand, maybe they already have enabled mobile recording by not preventing mobile web access and this is just a way to extract money from Verizon.
Phones are the new universal remote, and the mobile web + SMS is the new infrared.
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