TiVo is still struggling to add customers, and miscalculations over the popularity of its HDTV products also hurt the company's bottom line for the quarter ending in July.
The Alviso, Calif. DVR maker's continued struggles highlight the need for the company to get its cable partners moving. More than two years after Comcast announced it would put TiVo on some of its set top boxes, there has yet to be a single commercial rollout.
CEO Tom Rogers attempted to quell concerns about those delays, saying in a conference call that Comcast was about to rollout commercially in "the next few weeks" in portions of Massachusetts and New Hampshire including Boston.
However, that was about the only good news for the company. TiVo actually lost 145,000 customers in the quarter. More troubling is where it is losing paying subscribers: from those that have the standalone box, its most profitable segment. The decline was the first in the company's history.
Furthermore, the company underestimated the popularity of its new HDTV DVRs, causing it to take a $11.2 million writedown for leftover models of its standard DVR still in its inventories. The growth "progressed at a pace that surprised many in the industry, including us," CEO Tom Rogers said in a conference call.
These problems added up to a $17.7 million loss, down sharply from the $3.5 million loss in the year-ago quarter. The losses far outpaced both TiVo's and financial analyst's predictions.
Wall Street is not taking the news well; TiVo's stock was down nearly 10 percent in midday trading to $5.61.
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