Ad Age put is it in a very interesting light when it states that more homes have outhouses then have PVRs.
The point being, that sales are in the toilet.
I admit when the things first came out I had no idea what they were. They were marketed in such a poor fashion that no one could tell what they were. They should have been marketed as the next generation of the VCR. Just a VCR with a hard disk.
Oh well. The future for this technology is really in partnerships and licensing. Embedding the product in cable boxes and TV. Or, and here’s a thought, the VOD model where it’s not even in your house but all your paused/recorded/saved shows are just on a hard drive somewhere in a giant server farm in the midwest.
I firmly believe that time shifting technology is here to stay. Just not in the Tivo and Replay format we have today.
MORE U.S. HOMES HAVE OUTHOUSES THAN TIVOS
A case of the law of large numbers coming into play? Hardly. In a neighborhood of 200 homes, only one on average has a TiVo. More U.S. homes have outhouses (671,000) than TiVos (504,000 to 514,000).
