Supersized
Tivo’s soon-tobe-released Mega DVR has the power to do it all.
TiVo’s newest DVR will be so big, you could binge watch all 44 years worth of “Sesame Street” and 26 years of “The Simpsons.”
The TiVo Mega will be so big, you could record the 100 best movies of all time, just because.
And it will be so big, you could watch TV 24 hours a day, seven days a week for three straight years.
“If you are into gluttony, you should buy this product,” said TiVo chief marketing officer Ira Bahr.
No, the Mega isn’t straight out of a satirical “Saturday Night Live” skit. The Mega is an actual product San Jose’s TiVo introduced at an industry conference last month and plans to start selling in the first half of 2015.
The Mega will have a 24terabyte hard drive, enough to store 26,000 hours worth of shows recorded in standard definition, or 4,000 hours worth recorded in high definition. That’s about 30 times the capacity of existing cable or satellite DVRs.
It will also have six tuners to record six channels at once, and can stream live and re-
corded video to smart phones and tablets.
Yet even TiVo knows the Mega is completely unnecessary for 99 percent of TV viewers — according to Nielsen, the average American watches only about 5 hours of TV shows per day. And even the 1 percent who wouldn’t flinch at the expected $5,000 price might consider the Mega an extravagance.
But Bahr believes the Mega could appeal to those people who just want to live large. It’s the TV equivalent of driving a $500,000 Lamborghini Aventador, top speed of 217 mph, across the 45 mph speed limit Golden Gate Bridge.
“It was our goal to give people the biggest, most extravagant technology they could possibly think of in the DVR space,” Bahr said. “It is as close to no limits as possible. There are people who just don’t like limits.”
And just like a flashy Lamborghini, the Mega is TiVo’s eye-catching way of drawing attention to itself in an industry packed with video viewing alternatives, including cable and satellite services, Netflix, Chromecast, Roku and Apple TV, said Joel Espelien, senior analyst the Diffusion Group, a Plano, Texas, research firm.
“To me, it’s just a marketing ploy, like a hamburger joint coming up with a quadruple hamburger,” he said. “It’s a little hard to understand why you need that much capacity, even if you can record a whole bunch of shows.”
And, Espelien said, TiVo needs to call attention to its regular DVRs, because so many people — especially younger viewers — are choosing streaming video options.
Founded in 1997, TiVo has a record 4.8 million subscriptions, which the company defines as the number of TiVo devices with a monthly or lifetime subscription. TiVo’s Roamio DVRs cost between $199 and $599, with 75 to 450 hours of HD recording capacity.
That subscription number pales in comparison with Netflix, which was also founded in 1997 and has more than 50 million subscribers.
Meanwhile, Nielsen found that viewers ages 18 to 24 are watching only 19 hours a week of traditional TV, down five hours per week in the past three years. Moreover, the Millennial generation is more apt to cut their pay-TV cord altogether, so a TiVo DVR is “not wildly appealing to Millennials looking to save money,” Espelien said.
“I just feel that the market has moved on and that TiVo isn’t at the center of what’s really most most interesting and happening,” he said. “The market has passed them by. Consumers are moving to video-on-demand streaming and they’re not focused on DVRs at all.”
The Mega won’t be the first mega-home theater media center on the market. Sunnyvale’s Kaleidescape was founded in 2003, offering a device that could store hundreds of DVD movies in digital form.
It now has a $4,000 system capable of storing about 1,200 Blu-ray quality movies, either transferred from a disc or downloaded from Kaleidescape’s online store.
One customer has 10,000 movies stored on his system, said Kaleidescape CEO Cheena Srinivasan.
He said the Mega could find a place in the custom home theater market alongside his company’s movie servers because “Kaleidescape is more about movies and TiVo is more about TV.”
Potential customers are the type who don’t want to waste time looking for something to watch on TV, he said.
“We are serving the high end of the market,” he said. “It’s not people spending so much time sitting and watching movies. But socializing is very important to them, spending time with family and friends.”
TiVo is profitable, posting a $9.3 million net profit on revenue of $111.9 million. And the Mega did generate excitement last month at a trade convention in Denver, where people lined up to take selfies with a demo unit billed as “so big, it’s almost inappropriate.”
Among them were custom home theater installers, whose customers might spend thousands of dollars to outfit their family rooms with the latest 4K ultra HD TV monitors. And for those customers, having a collection of TV shows and movies ready to play at any time is worth the premium cost.
“Just the ability to be able to watch it, whether you need it or not, is in itself an advantage,” TiVo’s Bahr said.