TiVo Vows to Launch 'Most Advanced' Content-Discovery Tool of 'Internet Age'

As TiVo continues to hunt for buyers of its product and patent-licensing businesses, it plans this year to launch "the most advanced new content-discovery solution for the internet age," said interim CEO Raghu Rau on a Q4 call Tuesday evening. The product will "allow customers to build their own entertainment or streaming content bundle, and truly personalize their experience," he said. It will run on "natural language voice interactions, enabling personalized content discovery, monetizing audiences through sponsored promotions and delivering media engagement data to enable targeted advertising solutions," he said. TiVo has “ongoing discussions” with outside “parties” interested in buying the two businesses, Rau said. “This process is taking longer than we hoped” because of the businesses’ “complexity and uniqueness,” he said. TiVo owns an "extraordinary catalog" of "foundational" patents "across the TV and video domain," he said. Its goal was to wrap up finding buyers by year-end 2018, he said on the Q3 call Nov. 7. Though having failed to meet that target, Rau is “not willing to put a time limit on when this will happen,” he said Tuesday. TiVo's prolonged failure to find buyers sent the shares plummeting 13.9 percent Wednesday to close at $9.58.