From WSJ.com
ReplayTV Will Exit Direct Set-Top Sales,
Focus on Licensing Software to Others
By Anna Wilde Mathews
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Interactive-television provider ReplayTV Inc. will move away from selling its set-top devices to consumers and instead focus on licensing software to cable providers and other companies.
The strategic turn by the closely held company changes the landscape in the nascent business of personal video recorders, which allow users to store hours of television programming on a computer hard drive to watch at their leisure.
ReplayTV said it was losing money on retail sales of its devices and forecast advertising revenue wasn't materializing fast enough to bring it quickly to profitability. In addition, it had come under pressure from cable operators, satellite-television providers and others, which wanted to control their own recorder services.
The Mountain View, Calif., company will now mostly provide the technology behind the services and devices offered by other companies that, in addition to cable operators and satellite companies, could also include consumer-electronics makers, computer manufacturers and cable set-top-box makers.
"It's a much more pragmatic business model," said Steve Shannon, ReplayTV's vice president for marketing.
The move comes as ReplayTV, which in August postponed a public stock offering, faces tough competition from rival TiVo Inc., of San Jose, Calif., as well as a planned new offering from Microsoft Corp. called UltimateTV.
TiVo said that at the end of September it had an installed subscriber base of 73,000. ReplayTV declines to disclose its customer numbers, but analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research estimated the company has perhaps 30,000 users.
Mr. Bernoff projected that the move will speed up the rollout of personal video-recorder services, as cable providers and others move more quickly to integrate them into their own set-top devices.
In an earlier report, Forrester had projected that use of personal video recorders would grow from about 800,000 households this year to 53 million in 2005.
"The cable guys say, 'We want to make it look and work the way we prefer,' " Mr. Bernoff said. "There's now a simple-to-deploy alternative" for cable operators and others to provide their own services.
ReplayTV said that current Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Kim LeMasters, 50 years old, resigned. He was succeeded by Anthony Wood, 34, a current board member and former chief executive and chairman, effective immediately. Mr. LeMasters, a shareholder, said the shift brings the company into an area "outside my background and interest."
ReplayTV will also lay off an unspecified number of employees.
ReplayTV will continue to offer personal video-recorder services but will do so on behalf of other companies, with ReplayTV itself no longer selling advertising. Current customers will continue to get service. Companies, including Coca-Cola Co., that have signed up to advertise on ReplayTV, will be released from their contracts. ReplayTV was able to sell advertising that would appear on its service's screen much like a banner ad on an Internet site, among other forms.
The move takes ReplayTV out of the debate over advertising on the new generation of digital-television devices, which enable consumers to skip over traditional commercials. As the market for the devices grows, advertisers increasingly will be able to target TV viewers without working through broadcast networks. At the same time, they will be able to draw on a detailed storehouse of data the appliances can collect about users' preferences.
Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com
---
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ReplayTV Will Exit Direct Set-Top Sales,
Focus on Licensing Software to Others
By Anna Wilde Mathews
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Interactive-television provider ReplayTV Inc. will move away from selling its set-top devices to consumers and instead focus on licensing software to cable providers and other companies.
The strategic turn by the closely held company changes the landscape in the nascent business of personal video recorders, which allow users to store hours of television programming on a computer hard drive to watch at their leisure.
ReplayTV said it was losing money on retail sales of its devices and forecast advertising revenue wasn't materializing fast enough to bring it quickly to profitability. In addition, it had come under pressure from cable operators, satellite-television providers and others, which wanted to control their own recorder services.
The Mountain View, Calif., company will now mostly provide the technology behind the services and devices offered by other companies that, in addition to cable operators and satellite companies, could also include consumer-electronics makers, computer manufacturers and cable set-top-box makers.
"It's a much more pragmatic business model," said Steve Shannon, ReplayTV's vice president for marketing.
The move comes as ReplayTV, which in August postponed a public stock offering, faces tough competition from rival TiVo Inc., of San Jose, Calif., as well as a planned new offering from Microsoft Corp. called UltimateTV.
TiVo said that at the end of September it had an installed subscriber base of 73,000. ReplayTV declines to disclose its customer numbers, but analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research estimated the company has perhaps 30,000 users.
Mr. Bernoff projected that the move will speed up the rollout of personal video-recorder services, as cable providers and others move more quickly to integrate them into their own set-top devices.
In an earlier report, Forrester had projected that use of personal video recorders would grow from about 800,000 households this year to 53 million in 2005.
"The cable guys say, 'We want to make it look and work the way we prefer,' " Mr. Bernoff said. "There's now a simple-to-deploy alternative" for cable operators and others to provide their own services.
ReplayTV said that current Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Kim LeMasters, 50 years old, resigned. He was succeeded by Anthony Wood, 34, a current board member and former chief executive and chairman, effective immediately. Mr. LeMasters, a shareholder, said the shift brings the company into an area "outside my background and interest."
ReplayTV will also lay off an unspecified number of employees.
ReplayTV will continue to offer personal video-recorder services but will do so on behalf of other companies, with ReplayTV itself no longer selling advertising. Current customers will continue to get service. Companies, including Coca-Cola Co., that have signed up to advertise on ReplayTV, will be released from their contracts. ReplayTV was able to sell advertising that would appear on its service's screen much like a banner ad on an Internet site, among other forms.
The move takes ReplayTV out of the debate over advertising on the new generation of digital-television devices, which enable consumers to skip over traditional commercials. As the market for the devices grows, advertisers increasingly will be able to target TV viewers without working through broadcast networks. At the same time, they will be able to draw on a detailed storehouse of data the appliances can collect about users' preferences.
Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com
---
b]Hi rbdavis,
Welcome to AnandTech. I know you are new to our forums, so I wanted to let you know that in Hot Deals, new threads are for posting the deals you have found. Please post your comments in the appropriate moderator sponsored thread:
~~~~ IWANNA ~~~~ to ask for hot deals on the items you want.
~~~~ How Do I ~~~~ to ask how to price match, etc.
~~~~ Brag & Moan ~~~~ to rave about your great experience or complain about how badly you were treated.
I hope you find the deals you want. While you are at it, you might want to visit some of our sixteen other forums devoted to computers. You can find out how to get the most from your machine or just how to solve some problem you have been having.
Thank you,
AnandTech Moderator[/b]
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