TiVo Confident About Policy Questions Raised in En Banc Review

The federal appeals court that granted en banc review of a decision enforcing TiVo’s patents against Dish Network appears interested in bigger-picture questions about patent law rather than the details of the case, TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said Tuesday on the company’s Q2 earnings call. “They clearly are looking at these broader policy questions,” Roger said. “And if you believe that our case is strong, when it comes to the facts and the patent, we think it only becomes a more compelling case when it comes to these policy issues.” The policy question at issue is how long it should take to enforce an injunction over a patent when the infringer claims to have made changes to its product that mean it no longer infringes the patents, Rogers said.

TiVo lost fewer subscribers through it’s partnerships with pay-TV operators in Q2 than it had in many recent previous quarters, executives said as the company reported quarterly results. The subscriber losses stem mainly from DirecTV customers who have old TiVo boxes that don’t support the latest HD packages from DirecTV, Rogers said. “That has caused a certain amount of churn and has also caused a fairly broad level of anticipation among DirecTV subscribers who are looking for a new rendition of TiVos that is in sync with the HD offering of DirecTV today,” he said.

TiVo’s other deals with pay-TV distributors should hopefully bring the company back into positive territory in measuring subscriber growth through its partnerships, Rogers said. “I think that we've made substantial progress in getting operators to view the importance of our solution as a way they can, near term, deploy linear and broadband content,” he said.

Feedback has been good so far from TiVo’s initial deployments with RCN in Washington, Rogers said. And that’s helping increase interest among other operators, he said. “Now it’s really out there. Now people can see how quickly it can further their own needs,” he said, according to a transcript provided by SeekingAlpha. “And we're finding that that is providing quite an impetus for the potential for other cable operator activity."

TiVo’s Q2 sales fell 14 percent from a year earlier to $36.2 million. Its net loss more than tripled from a year earlier to $14.2 million.