Independent media platform TiVo is 25 years old this year. Rather than just buy a cake to celebrate, though, TiVo has instead announced a huge expansion of its operation by launching TiVo OS for TVs.
TiVo built its reputation on ground-breakingly intelligent PVRs, which created a content recommendation system before AI was even a twinkle in the AV world’s eye. Now, though, in recognition of the rapid shift in recent years towards single devices that both carry and play smart/content services – such as smart TVs – TiVo has thrown itself into the development of a new TV operating system alongside the likes of Google TV, Tizen OS, webOS and Roku.
This new TiVo OS was officially launched for the UK and Europe at an event in London today (May 21), where it was revealed that the new interface will be arriving in a surprisingly wide range of brands for a debut service.
One of these is Panasonic, which, as I reported last week, is including the platform on two of its affordable LCD TVs. Thanks to TiVo’s relationship with huge European OEM TV manufacturer Vestel, though, TiVo OS will also be appearing on a wide range of other TV brands in the coming months. These include, most significantly, many of the new 2024 Bush TVs sold at Argos stores; new Sharp TVs in some European countries; some European JVC-branded TVs; and upcoming Telefunken models in Germany.
TiVo revealed at its launch event, too, that its new operating system will be coming to US TVs later this year, but isn’t yet at liberty to divulge which US TV brands it might be working with.
The new TiVo OS arrives arguably quite late to the party in what already looks like a very crowded TV OS marketplace. As noted earlier, there are already numerous TVs out there carrying established smart systems such as Google TV, Tizen OS, WebOS and Roku, and you can add to those Fire TV, Hisense’s VIDAA platform, the recently launched Titan OS, Panasonic’s proprietary My Home Screen system and more besides. So what makes TiVo think it can make its mark in such an already seemingly over-saturated market?
Having now seen the service in action on both Bush and Panasonic TVs over the past week or so, and having now had the opportunity to listen to execs at TiVo owner Xperi (the company that also owns the DTS audio brand) discuss their plans for it, I’d say the TiVo OS ‘difference’ emerges from three key areas: TiVo’s long history of and experience with delivering customer-friendly interfaces; its long history of forging relationships with key stakeholders in both the hardware and content delivery worlds; and the transparency and monitoring provided by its also newly announced TiVo One advertising system.
The first two consumer-facing tenets of the TiVo OS offering are instantly apparent in the straightforward, easy to follow home screen, seriously intuitive voice recognition system (which lets you keep drilling down through search results with further contextual comments, and even supports search by movie quote), and the exceptional sophistication of the system’s content recommendation system. And when I say ‘sophistication’, I’m talking about how comprehensive it is when it comes to the range of content services and sources it covers in producing its recommendations, rather than implying that anything complicated is appearing on screen.
In fact, all the most relevant content for you based on your viewing habits and your use of TiVo’s distinctive ‘thumbs up or thumbs down’ interface is presented so clearly and routinely that you’d imagine compiling it was the easiest thing in the world. When in fact the process depends on a huge amount of background work and third party relationships.
The TiVo OS is also keen to stand out against some of the other ‘big guns’ of the smart TV world – especially Google TV… – by going the extra mile to ensure that its covers local services as well as global ones. So for the UK TiVo OS version I’ve seen in action, TiVo has gone to the trouble of forging a deep OS tie with the new Freely smart service that’s just been rolled out by Everyone TV: A conglomerate of the BBC, ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five.
This brings to the TiVo OS all the UK-specific catch up apps Freely was expressly designed to handle, and integrates them seamlessly within the TiVo menu system. The only way you can tell where something on the TiVo OS is coming via its connection with Freely and where something is coming directly via TiVo is that the Freely content links appear in a landscape format while the TiVo links appear with a portrait orientation.
I can’t say if the sort of localisation options in other territories will be as comprehensively integrated as the Freely one in the UK, but TiVo repeatedly stated at the launch event how much importance it places on leveraging the relationships it’s cultivated around the world over the past 25 years to make sure advanced localization happens.
The new TiVo One system Xperi also announced at its event today, meanwhile, combines ad inventory across multiple end-points in the home and car (TiVo already has a deal to put its OS into some BMW models, and other car brands are anticipated to follow), “empowering advertisers to efficiently optimise branded campaigns to their desired audiences with advanced forecasting, precise targeting and robust measurement capabilities.” Fascinating though this may sound to advertisers, it might not at first glance sound like something consumers need to be interested in. Especially when my experience is that many TV users are at best nonplussed about and at worst actively hostile to the idea of advertisements turning up in their TV interfaces.
Actually, though, TiVo stressed repeatedly at its 25th birthday party/TiVo OS event that the need/desire of its stakeholders to make a success of TiVo OS advertising depends hugely on how effectively the OS engages consumers. Basically, if TiVo OS users don’t like the interface – including if they’re put off by badly integrated or irrelevant/untailored ads – they won’t keep engaging with the OS as much, meaning fewer eyeballs on adverts. So in its own oblique way, the new TiVo One ads management part of TiVo OS has elements to it that should spur TiVo on to keep making its new OS keeps better for consumers as well as advertisers.
I’ll publish an update on the TiVo OS’s roll out in the US as soon as more details are available.
—
Related Reading
Panasonic Unveils Full OLED And LCD TV Range For 2024 – Including First TiVo Models
Freely Smart TV Service Announces Launch Date And Unveils New Interface And Features
Amazon Prime Video’s New Ads-Based Subscription Has A Surprise Catch
