TiVo’s CEO wants you to know that every time you read about TiVo chatting, the company is not nessecarily weighing a marriage proposal. “There’s a rumor every two weeks about TiVo,” CEO Tom Rogers said at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit on Monday. “Generally those rumors tend to follow some kind of strategic discussion on how we might work together. Immediately, people assume we must have had a discussion about an acquistion.”
In recent years, Wall Street analysts and Internet chat rooms alike have suggested that TiVo - with a market capitalization less than $1 billlion - may be a ripe target for consumer electronics makers and media companies. Forrester Research analyst Josh Benoff famously published an open letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs that said “Buy TiVo.”
Rogers acknowledged that TiVo needs to grow its fee-paying subscribers and faces many tough challenges. As a result, the company is steadily seeking out new deals to get unique services — such as the ability to buy movie tickets via Yahoo — on a TiVo box.
“Our dance card on that stuff is amazingly impressive,” he said. “We are constantly talking to blue-chip companies that find themselves in the news regularly, and somehow get painted as potential acquirers. But the nature of the discussions have not been well reported.”
That said — when given a chance to definitively quash rumors that Cisco Systems was currently interested in buying Tivo, Rogers declined to comment. “I think .. we can have some interesting discussions (with other companies). I don’t want to get into discussions with specific companies (during this interview),” he said.”
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