TiVo is cutting 50 full-time employees and some contractors as the company plans to refocus on North American MSO growth.
Interim CEO Naveen Chopra, who is currently TiVo's CFO, told employees Monday about the job cuts and TiVo's renewed emphasis on MVPD partnerships, international expansion and consumer innovation in a memo obtained by Multichannel News.
In the memo, Chopra specified that middleware provider Cubiware and analytics provider Digitalsmiths, both of which TiVo acquired in the past two years, will be critical to the company's new strategy.
TiVo has a fourth-quarter earnings call scheduled for this afternoon and could use that opportunity to provide more details about the job cuts. The company couldn't immediately respond to questions on its job cuts.
Though TiVo likely will not entirely abandon its retail strategy, MSO partnerships are clearly where the third-party CPE manufacturer's bread is buttered. For the third quarter, TiVo said it added another 418,000 cable subscribers, bringing its MVPD customer total to 5.5 million.
But at the same time TiVo is placing greater emphasis on its partnerships with U.S. MVPDs, the DVR maker is backing a plan from the FCC to unlock the set-top market largely controlled by cable, satellite and IPTV providers. The proposal, which also has the support of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), could significantly disrupt the set-top revenue flow for MSOs and has been widely derided by MVPDs, which argue that such measures are unnecessary given the current push behind TV Everywhere and virtual MVPDs applications that open up the device ecosystem to many more devices.
For more:
- read this Multichannel News article
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