Posted by chicagomedia.org on May 29, 2008 at 21:42:13:
TiVo Service Will Deliver Selections of TV Critic
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 28, 2008
Television viewers have been reading the recommendations of local critics for years. Soon a subset of TiVo users will be able to automatically record a critic's picks of The Chicago Tribune.
TiVo, a leading maker of digital video recorders, is expected to announce on Wednesday a partnership with The Tribune that will deliver the recommendations of Maureen Ryan, the TV critic for The Tribune, straight to the TVs of users who sign up for the service.
The deal, to be announced the same day as TiVo reports first-quarter earnings, is the latest in a series of service enhancements. Brian Coyne, an analyst for Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Company, said the Tribune partnership was "another expansion of TiVo's feature set."
Mr. Coyne added, "They continue to seek to differentiate their product relative to what they're calling generic DVRs" that cable or satellite customers receive from service providers.
In March the company introduced downloads from YouTube and other Internet video.
One in four households now own a DVR, indicating viewers are becoming more comfortable with the time-shifting abilities of the technology offered by TiVo and other companies.
The recommendation service will be available only to the roughly 100,000 TiVo subscribers in the region surrounding Chicago. But Thomas S. Rogers, chief executive of TiVo, said in an interview that TiVo was in talks about similar partnerships with other print media outlets. The service, if extended to other markets, could create new relevance for local television critics, whose numbers have shrunk in recent years as papers cut expenses.
"It creates a connection between reading the recommendations and actually having them on your TV set at your convenience," he said.
Additionally, Ms. Ryan will host twice-monthly videos summarizing her recommendations.
The partnership came about as James Warren, the managing editor for features at The Tribune, grappled with options for reorienting the newspaper's Sunday TV Week digest of critics' recommendations and network listings. While the printed listings still have a loyal audience, Mr. Warren said, Internet and on-screen guides are diminishing their value, prompting The Tribune to reformat the section and add Internet content recommendations. He said the TiVo partnership seemed like a no-lose proposition.
"Maybe we'll get a few people to do the unthinkable and subscribe to the newspaper," he said.
The more immediate benefit may come from Chicago-area consumers who choose to subscribe to TiVo after seeing the newspaper's advertisements of the service. The Tribune will receive a share of the new subscriber revenue.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial expect TiVo to report a first-quarter loss of 1 cent a share on revenue of $55.6 million for the period ended April 30.