TiVo swung to a second quarter profit as the company continued to pile on subs through its partnerships with cable operators.
TiVo said it added 283,000 net subs through MSO partnerships, up from 238,000 in the year-ago quarter, a 20% improvement from the year-ago quarter, extending the total in that category to 3.86 million. Those quarterly adds more than made up for a net loss of 20,000 TiVo-owned subscribers in the quarter.
TiVo, which added a record 341,000 subs through pay-TV partners in its fiscal first quarter, ended the second quarter with 4.80 million cumulative subs (937,000 TiVo-owned and 3.86 million via partnerships). TiVo added roughly 1.2 million subs through MSO partnerships during the last 12-month period, versus a loss of about 44,000 TiVo-owned subscribers.
Following a recent win with Cogeco, which will help TiVo step up its presence in Canada, the company also make more progress on the tier-2 front in the U.S., announcing a win with Entouch, a Houston-based MVPD.
TiVo posted second quarter revenues of $111.9 million, up 11.8%. Revenues tied to MSO deals were up 37% in the period.
TiVo also reported a profit of $9.3 million (8 cents per share), well off from $268.9 million ($1.96 per share) in a year-ago quarter that included a $276 million gain in net income stemming from lawsuit settlements with Cisco Systems and Motorola/Google.
Analysts were expecting a profit of 7 cents per share on revenues of $87.7 million.
TiVo on Tuesday also announced a $350 million share repurchase plan that calls for TiVo to repurchase $100 million of stock during its current fiscal year and the remainder in the next two fiscal years.
TiVo and Comcast are working on a next-generation, non-CableCARD solution for TiVo devices sold at retail, but have not said when they expect it to be ready to go or explained how they will go about it technically. But TiVo is hopeful that other MVPDs end up adopting the approach that’s being proposed.
“We do plan to have discussions with other MSOs about getting on board this notion of working to make sure there is a next generation, CableCARD-less approach to conditional access that will make it both cheaper and more efficient for the operator and easier and with less friction for the consumer,” TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said in an interview.
Elsewhere, TiVo is also testing a network DVR product with Virgin Media and other operators that TiVo has not yet identified.
“It [the network DVR] drives a lot of additional credibility about our future roadmap and where we can take them, but it’s much more an issue of when operators will want to do it than our ability to do it,” Rogers said. “I think most operators are going much slower on that front than maybe people originally thought.”
