Tom Rogers

 

A pioneer of the digital video recorder (DVR), TiVo helped revolutionize the television-viewing experience by giving customers the ability to record shows and play them back at a more convenient time. It also allowed viewers to move their recordings from the DVR box to their PC or mobile device. Tom Rogers is a big believer in offering his customers infinite choice.

 

WS:How are your customers enjoying their programming?

ROGERS:What customers get when they buy TiVo is control of the viewing experience. Control can mean different things to different people. To some people it means not having to watch commercials during a show. To others it’s being able to watch shows when they want to watch. For others it’s watching sports events more closely or in slow motion.

 

What we are now seeing is where control meets what I’ll call infinite choice. That takes TiVo from being a device that can record programming that is coming through linear television and turns it into a device that allows you to get anything you want whenever you want—and recording is simply one way of having that choice. With the facilitation of broadband video to the television set and the integration of content that cable and satellite do not provide, whether it is through Amazon or Netflix or Blockbuster or YouTube, you have the ability to get to your television what you want, when you want it, whether or not it’s on linear television. So what we’re seeing is choice meets control; control meets choice. It’s the interaction of the amount of choice and the ultimate control that you can assert over that.

 

WS:TiVo offers Amazon VOD, Netflix, YouTube. How do you decide what to offer?

ROGERS:Viewer control of the TV-consumption experience means the consumer should be making that decision. And it’s important to remember that the consumer doesn’t care if something is coming via broadcast, via cable or via broadband. TiVo stands for the proposition that one box and one remote control and one user interface and one search approach can get you one-stop shopping for anything you want, no matter what that is or who provides it.

 

WS: What have you been doing to overcome the accusation that TiVo is damaging the broadcast business?

ROGERS:For a while there was a view that we were a pariah that did not understand television’s business model. What advertisers and networks now understand is that there is a bunch of generic DVRs that allow people to avoid commercials and have no regard to creating a business model that enables television advertising to flourish in a different form.

 

I am a huge believer that just as you can’t force people to read an ad in a magazine when they are flipping pages, it is an artificial approach to media consumption to force somebody to watch a commercial. Having said that… television can still be an incredibly impactful advertising medium, even if viewers aren’t going to have the patience to have their show interrupted with a pod of 30-second commercials.

 

We’re about creating a collection of ways—whether it’s the ability to pause a program, or a message at the end of the program—that make the high-definition television screen an even more impactful advertising environment than solely relying on the passive 30-second ad. And we do it with the notion that the consumer wants to be engaged more deeply with certain advertising, as opposed [to] something that is imposed on them and they don’t want to see, thus making the TiVo advertising engagement that much more valuable for the advertiser, that much more useful for the consumer. We are convinced, and we have many advertisers who work with us on this, that [that] is a critical element of the future business model of television.

 

WS:What can TiVo tell advertisers about which commercials are being watched and who’s watching them?

ROGERS:We can demonstrate with second-by-second data that looks at any network, any daypart, any show, any commercial pod within any show, any commercial within that commercial pod and any second within that commercial, and we can show what happens to the viewership. Through that, you can create all kinds of comparative data about what works against different dayparts, different demographics, different kinds of programs. When 50 or 60 million homes—that’s roughly three-quarters of the homes that advertisers most care about reaching—have DVRs in the next few years with the ability to avoid ads, then advertisers should be really looking at this granular data and learning what new forms of inventory will help their messages get through.