TiVo Teams with Amazon to Enable Tcommerce on its Platform

--Releases First Data from its PowerWatch Service

--Launches YouTube Support

--Signs Audience Research Deal with TRA

--Teams with Seven to Launch HD DVR in Australia

DVR vendor/service provider, TiVo, has formed a new partnership
with Amazon that will enable its customers to purchase physical
products from Amazon.com on their TV sets using their TiVo
remote control (note: TiVo has had a partnership in place with
Amazon for some time now that enables its customers to purchase
movies from the latter's Amazon Unbox service). TiVo says that
this new "Product Purchase" feature, which is available to
customers equipped with its broadband-enabled Series2, Series3
(note: TiVo has just removed the listing for the Series3 from its
online store, leading to speculation that it is discontinuing the
product) and TiVo HD DVR's, will be of particular interest to
advertisers who offer products on Amazon.com, as they will now be
able to offer viewers the ability to impulse-purchase those products
directly from their commercials and other advertising on the TiVo
platform. The company also points out that the feature could enable
any TV show on which a product is featured (i.e. not just
home-shopping programs) to serve as a trigger for tcommerce
transactions (if a show was being viewed in time-shifted mode, a list of
products that had been featured on the show would appear on the
delete-or-save screen that displays at the end of each TiVo-recorded
program). "Product Purchase adds a whole new dimension to the TV
viewing experience," Evan Young, TiVo's director of broadband
services, said in a prepared statement. "By teaming with Amazon.com,
TiVo enables viewers to purchase products related to their favorite TV
shows or that they've seen in TV ads without leaving their couch. For
example, if a guest on the Daily Show or Oprah has a new book, CD, or
DVD out, you can purchase it on Amazon.com using your TiVo remote
without missing a second of TV, whether the viewer is watching live or
recorded. The viewer with an impulse can buy right away and no longer
needs to remember to do so the next time they are at their PC.
Television advertisers and consumer products companies are no longer
limited to the traditional linear shopping channels that require live
viewing for product merchandising and fulfillment--if their product is
seen or advertised on any TV show or network, and sold by
Amazon.com it can be merchandised to viewers through TiVo."

According to TiVo, consumers can also use its platform's Universal
Swivel Search feature to easily explore and buy products associated
with their favorite shows, movies, actors and directors: once they select
a product, they have the option of completing a purchase immediately
or of adding the product to their Amazon.com shopping cart for later
checkout. Shipping and tax (if applicable) are automatically calculated
and presented to the consumer before final confirmation, the company
says, and purchases are secured with a PIN associated with the
consumer's Amazon.com account. In addition, advertisers can
merchandise specific products through TiVo advertising features such
as Interactive Tags (allow viewers to access additional information on
an advertised product while automatically pausing the program they
were watching), Gold Star Sponsorships and Program Placement
(enables advertisers to target viewers of specific shows and genres with
related products). "Teaming up with TiVo enables TV advertisers to
break free of traditional shopping channel limitations and reach a
specific, targeted audience regardless of which network or show they
are watching," Amazon.com's senior manager of business development,
Scott Merlino, said in a prepared statement. "Now, a record label can
merchandise and sell a new artist's CD on a show where the music is
featured, or a publisher can merchandise an author's book during a talk
show when the author appears as a guest--the marketing possibilities
are endless. Teaming up with TiVo is a great way to engage consumers
during a TV program with a direct connection to the product being
sold."

TiVo and Amazon launched the new Product Purchase service by
merchandising products related to a number of high-profile shows,
including "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "The Ellen DeGeneres Show,"
"The Colbert Report" and "Burn Notice."

In other TiVo news:

1. The company has released the first data (for May, 2008) from its PowerWatch ratings service. The service--which TiVo developed with the assistance of media planning and buying agency, Starcom USA--provides advertisers with demographically segmented, second-by-second program and commercial ratings data from 20,000 households that have volunteered to participate in a "passive" consumer panel (note: participants do not need any special devices or log-ins in order to participate). It enables subscribers to TiVo's StopWatch service (note: the StopWatch service compiles second-by-second behavioral and viewership data from a separate anonymous sample of 20,000 TiVo units, and then makes these data available via a sortable database of ratings for nationally run programs and commercials from cable and broadcast networks dating back to 2006) to look at TV viewing broken down by standard household demographics, including income, geography, ethnicity, number of children, and tenure of TiVo subscription. Because panelists have consented to having TiVo collect their personally identifiable viewing information, the company can associate household data with viewership data, in order to produce program and commercial viewership reports by aggregate demographic and behavioral audience groups (note: TiVo stresses that all reports prepared using these data are anonymous).

   According to TiVo, its May, 2008 PowerWatch data show:

   • that, contrary to what one might expect, people who have subscribed to TiVo service for more than three years are no more likely to skip commercials than those who have been subscribers for one to three years. Essentially, the company says, there is no "meaningful difference" in the amount of time-shifted viewing by or the fast-forwarding habits of the two groups.
   • that all demographic segments time-shift and fast-forward commercials at a high rate, but that there are differences pertaining to the specific commercials that viewers choose to skip. Thus, for example, the company says, there are significant differences between the amount of time households with children under 12 spend watching commercials for certain product categories, and the amount of time spent by households with adults over 50.

   "For the past year-and-a-half, the StopWatch ratings service has helped the industry better understand how DVR's are impacting viewing behavior, especially time-shifting and commercial fast-forwarding," Todd Juenger, general manager of TiVo Audience Research & Measurement, said in a prepared statement. "Nonetheless, questions remained about who is watching or fast-forwarding what commercials and how it relates to household demographics. The PowerWatch ratings service provides answers to these questions." Added Tracey Scheppach, VP and director of video innovation at Starcom USA: "This preliminary look at TiVo's second-by-second viewing data points toward the growing availability of new insights that were unimaginable only a few years ago. New viewing behaviors revealed by correlations between household demographic, product category and ad fast-forwarding show that while everyone is fast-forwarding through ads, effective message delivery can help make an ad resonate more. The PowerWatch ratings service will continually enable us to more accurately measure viewer behavior by specific demographic segments, which in turn can help us adjust our strategy and maximize return for our clients."

   

2. The company has now launched a previously announced service that enables its customers to browse and watch YouTube videos on regular TV, via their TiVo DVR's standard interface (note: the service is available only on broadband-connected TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD DVR's; TiVo is in the process of rolling out the software upgrade for those boxes that enables the service). "With YouTube content now available on TiVo, on top of all the movies, music videos, songs and TV shows that are simply unavailable on cable and satellite, TiVo subscribers have more choice on their TV sets than any other TV viewers in the world," TiVo president and CEO, Tom Rogers, said in a prepared statement. According to TiVo, its new YouTube service will shortly be expanded to enable customers to log into their YouTube accounts through its DVR's, so that they can access their personal channels and playlists.
3. The company has signed an agreement with TRA--a company that has developed what it bills as the only scalable advertising research system to create intelligent media data by measuring and reporting true ROI accountability and transparency for advertising spend--that will see TRA licensing and marketing TiVo Audience Research Metrics as a bundled offering alongside its own MediaTRAnalytics service.

   According to the companies, their partnership will see TRA drawing anonymous viewing data from TiVo's base of 1.7 million standalone (i.e. not acquired through its partnerships with pay-TV operators, DirecTV and Comcast) subscribers. This, they say, will give the Media TRAnalytics service--which TRA claims is the only research service to correlate household purchasing behavior with media exposure--access to an "unprecedented" national sample size, which it can use to evaluate ROI for media spend. The companies say that the deal will accelerate TRA's stated goal of having a million households nationwide of anonymous single-source data (i.e. TV viewership associated with household purchase data), and that the combined data from TRA and TiVo will provide the "most comprehensive universe of anonymous purchasing data and anonymous viewership data, covering all television signal sources including digital cable, analog cable, satellite, and over-the-air television, in live and time-shifted viewing."

   TRA claims to have agreements in place for its research services with three MSO's, and has been producing anonymous, aggregate reports that associate TV viewership with household purchasing data, based on cable data, since October 2007. It plans to expand its use of cable data and to harmonize that data with TiVo data to produce what it promises will be the largest and most representative anonymous sampling of the US television audience. "We are at a pivotal time for the advertising community, as new technologies open new research avenues for the industry to get more in-depth insight into who is viewing which programs and then purchasing products based on advertising," TRA chairman and CEO, Mark Lieberman, said in a prepared statement. "TRA's agreement with TiVo is exciting for our company as Media TRAnalytics becomes the most advanced media and marketing research solution available on the market today."

   TiVo's new partnership with TRA appears to have met with the approval of CBS, which is an existing customer of both companies' research services and which provided the following prepared statement for their press release announcing the partnership (the statement was attributed to David Poltrack, CBS's chief research officer and president of CBS Vision): "As a TiVo StopWatch and Media TRAnalytics subscriber, the level of actionable, detailed reporting that each provides is extremely valuable in helping us evaluate TV viewing behavior and the efficacy of our advertisers' campaigns. By combining forces, TiVo and TRA will essentially be offering the 'single-source' measurement of television viewing and product purchasing behavior that the marketing community has been asking for since the 1970's." Added Todd Juenger, general manager of TiVo Audience Research & Measurement: "TiVo's expansive audience behavioral data, coupled with TRA's access to the richest amount of purchase statistics with corresponding demographics, creates the most powerful, comprehensive research tool for measuring advertising efficacy and ROI of media spend--bar none. By matching this anonymous data, without using small, unreliable panels, advertisers are finally able to connect TV viewing patterns to household purchase behavior and achieve meaningful insight in a way that respects consumer privacy."

4. The company has teamed with Australian media company, Seven Media Group, to launch its HD DVR box and service in Australia. An exclusive agreement between the two companies sees Seven creating the free-to-air digital platform to enable TiVo's service. As a result, all Australia's free-to-air digital channels can be accessed through the TiVo set-top, which is significant as around 70% of Australians watch free-to-air rather than pay-TV.

   The partnership between the companies makes TiVo's service--including such features as Season Pass recordings, WishList searches, and the wide array of content now available on TiVo boxes via broadband--available across the entire continent. It will also see Seven deploying TiVo's interactive TV advertising capabilities (which enable viewers to click, when they see an on-screen icon, to pause a program and access a dedicated advertiser location that can contain video and other rich media) and its broadband programming services, including movies-on-demand, later this year. "TiVo's arrival in Australia further strengthens free-to-air television in Australia," Seven Media Group CEO, David Leckie, said in a prepared statement. "Over more than five decades, free-to-air television continues to define the media landscape. Our future focuses on creating and delivering programming across multiple channels on digital free-to-air television, of dramatically expanding the television experience for the 7 out of 10 Australians who only watch free-to-air television. And it's about us meeting new consumer demands for more control, more services and more involvement in the television experience. TiVo will play a key role in the future of free-to-air television in Australia: an industry committed to reflecting the lives of Australians, creating and producing programs that Australians want to watch and introducing the technology and the broader multichannel platform that will redefine television in this country." Added TiVo's Tom Rogers: "By working with Seven, one of the foremost media companies in Australia and the world, we have a strong partner that understands that the future of television technology lies at the intersection between broadcast and broadband. Together, we expect to generate the same success in Australia that we did in the US and establish a platform which will extend our opportunities to grow in other parts of the world."

   The TiVo-Seven partnership will see TiVo boxes being sold in retail
   at Harvey Norman and Domayne stores for AUS$699 (note:
   Domayne is owned by Harvey Norman; the two companies have a
   total of 190 retail outlets in Australia), while Unwired will support
   the sales and distribution of TiVo boxes to retail and online
   customers. According to Seven, Australian TiVo customers will not
   be "tied to an ongoing subscription plan" (they will, however, have
   to pay extra for various TiVo features that are included as part of
   its subscription service in the US--though TiVo says that YouTube
   support, which is scheduled to launch in Australia early next year,
   will be offered free of charge) and their boxes will receive
   automatic software updates via their broadband connection.