TiVo App Feature Suggests Live Programs in Real Time

TiVo launched an update to its iPad app Thursday that’s designed to funnel personalized viewing suggestions to subscribers using popularity metrics and personalized usage data, Jim Denney, vice president of product marketing, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The “What to Watch Now” feature shows programs airing within the next 30 minutes in six categories: most popular shows, sports, movies, kids programming, favorite channels and viewers’ recorded TV shows. The latter gives users fast access to their 20 most recently recorded shows as a shortcut to scrolling through titles in the My Shows section, Denney said. Suggested programs update every 30 minutes, he said.

Denney cited the search and browse features available in the TV-based TiVo service, but said “we wanted an experience where everything you're going to be told about is available right now.” What consumers want to watch shouldn’t be hard to find, he said. “It’s surprising how much content you have access to that you may not be taking advantage of,” Denney said. Data are gathered using audience research information, he said. “We gather, anonymously, viewing information about shows other TiVo users are watching.” There’s no advertiser influence in the suggested programs, he said.

With the new features, users can choose which sports they'd like in their feed, and suggested sports events are annotated with a “excitement factor” rating supplied by Thuuz. The data company collects real-time metrics on sporting events to help consumers discover and track favorite teams or current games. A numerical value from 0-100 shows a sports event’s excitement level, according to Thuuz, which processes streams of play-by-play data to determine a rating. Data used to calculate excitement levels include point differentials, upsets, comebacks, and other details from every game in progress using proprietary algorithms designed to “ensure objectivity and consistency,” according to the Thuuz website.

For “What to Watch Now,” data are gathered broadly according to popularity and then tapered to the tastes and subscriptions of users, Denney said. Initial data for each category are a “superset” of what’s “popular across the footprint,” and then the app determines which channels users receive based on information they've plugged in such as favorite channels, he said. Additional categories will be added in future updates based on user feedback, he said.

The TiVo update was available Thursday to iPad and iPhone users and an update for Android will follow, Denney said. In a brief run with the software, we found the feature to be easy to navigate but not very useful for Thursday afternoon viewing where live popular programming included soap operas and daytime talk shows that didn’t fit our viewing preferences. We also didn’t find any live movies that were appealing out of 20 listed. But if the movies section does show a movie we want to record from an on-demand channel with multiple viewing times, we can easily select an upcoming listing from the app, a nice feature.

TiVo made headlines last week when it was revealed that its free PC Desktop software would only be available through June 5. The price of its TiVo Desktop Plus software was lowered from $24.95 to $15.99. Denney called the moves from the free to paid software a “transition” due to compatibility issues with Windows 8. The free desktop app “was having troubles” on Windows 8 PCs, he said, while Desktop Plus was not. Over time, TiVo will migrate to other technologies in Desktop Plus to replace functions lost with TiVo Desktop, he said.