Continuing to straddle the line in the video industry while responding to new competition in the consumer networked DVR market, TiVo has announced a new retail version of its Bolt DVR targeted directly to cord cutters.

The Bolt OTA for Antenna delivers four tuners and a one terabyte hard drive capable of recording 150 hours of HD programming. The 4K capable box includes TiVo’s popular user experience, as well as access to popular OTT services, and retails for $250. TiVo is cutting its monthly DVR service charge for the Bolt OTA from $14.99 a month to $6.99 a month. There as also a $250 lifetime service fee option.

Related: Amazon Rolls Out Network DVR ‘Fire TV Recast’

TiVo has targeted the cord cutter market for some time with its Roamio OTA DVR. But it hasn’t offered an OTA retail version of the Bolt since it introduced the set-top product to the cable TV service provider market four years ago. But giving the retail market the same tools as it offers to service providers does not put TiVo’s two product lines in conflict, the company insisted.

“For several years TiVo has offered a product targeting cord cutters with the Roamio OTA DVR. The new Bolt OTA for antenna is an upgrade aimed at this market,” said Ted Malone, VP of consumer products and services for TiVo. “TiVo also offers a six-tuner version of the Bolt Vox designed specifically for digital cable customers. With the rapidly changing media and entertainment landscape, cable operators recognize that they face a range of competition--over-the-top providers, virtual MPVD operators (Playstation Vue, YouTube TV, Sling TV), among others – offering cord cutter options, which are more disruptive than TiVo’s Bolt OTA.

TiVo is extending availability of its premium DVR to the retail over-the-air market just after Amazon debuted its own network DVR, the Fire TV Recast, which sells for $230 and includes no service fee. 

Integrating apps from subscription video-on-demand services into cable set-top boxes could go a long way toward tapping into an underserved demographic for subscription video-on-demand — older viewers — while providing pay TV with another retention tool, according to some analysts.

Several cable, telco TV and satellite-TV providers already have integrated apps from Netflix and Hulu into their set-tops, and digital video recorder pioneer TiVo has had a Netflix app incorporated into its boxes for years. And TiVo’s newest product — TiVo Bolt — integrates Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and other Internet streaming services with the box, while also serving as a DVR. But Morgan Stanley media analyst Ben Swinburne said there a few key operators missing, notably Comcast and Charter Communications.

POSSIBLE WIN FOR BOTH

Getting Comcast and Charter into the set-top integration fold could help the cable operators’ retention efforts while giving the SVOD services access to older customers.

That could be a key demographic for Netflix in particular. After a strong first quarter of domestic subscriber growth — it added 2.2 million customers in the period — Netflix said subscriber increases would slow in the second quarter to about 500,000. Netflix could make up the difference by targeting older pay TV customers, Swinburne said.

According to a survey by researcher AlphaWise and Morgan Stanley, about 63% of respondents aged 18-29 were Netflix subscribers while just 30% of those aged 45-64 and 19% of those aged 65 and up used the SVOD service. Ease of use was one of the reasons those nonsubscribers gave for not being Netflix customers.

Attracting the older demo could be a coup for Netflix. Swinburne said older viewers watch more TV on their TV sets: about 19 hours a week, compared with 11 hours for 18-to-29-year-olds.

They also are more likely to subscribe to pay TV: 92% of consumers 65 and up and 88% of 45-to-64-year-olds were pay TV subscribers, compared to 86% for the 18-to-19-year-olds.

“Set-top integration would introduce Netflix to this customer base through a service the cohort is already using frequently, and reduce the friction associated with Netflix consumption on a TV set,” Swinburne wrote in a note to clients.

Swinburne has some data to back that up. In the U.K., cable operator Virgin Media saw Netflix subscriptions rise significantly after it began rolling out TiVo set-tops.

Swinburne said there was a direct correlation between customers with TiVo boxes and Netflix usage. Virgin began rolling out TiVo boxes with a Netflix app in November 2013, when Netflix usage among its customers was less than 20%. By September 2015, when 78% of its customers had an integrated TiVo box, Netflix usage grew to 28%.

Virgin Media wasn’t the only U.K. provider to experience the same phenomenon. At telecom and video service provider TalkTalk, Netflix usage increased from 17% in September 2014 to 25% in September 2015. TalkTalk began integrating the Netflix app in its boxes in January of 2015.

While there are issues that would have to be worked out still, Swinburne said he believes that adding the nearly 40 million video customers from Comcast and Charter to the mix could help tip the scales for Netflix. Comcast’s X1 platform could easily accommodate a Netflix app as it continues to roll out across the country. Although Comcast has been mum on the possibility of integrating Netflix into X1, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has said publicly that the cable operator would investigate the possibility.

Comments like those have helped fuel Swinburne’s optimism, adding that Charter and even Comcast could be “willing partners with Netflix in the near or medium term.”

ENHANCING BROADBAND

Pivotal Research Group CEO and senior media & communications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak said integrating the app with set-tops makes sense.

“It is pretty easy to get Netflix, but for some folks — mainly the older generation — anything that makes it easier to sign up would be beneficial for Netflix subscriptions. If Netflix is willing to give up part of the economics, it becomes more palatable for distributors.”

While cable operators may be skittish, thinking that integrating Netflix could cut into pay-per-view revenue, Swinburne believes the impact would be minimal.

And as broadband becomes more prevalent — all the major operators now have more high-speed Internet customers than video customers — making them happy becomes even more important.

“At two hours daily of viewing per member, cable operators — increasingly more ISPs than MVPDs — have growing reason to bring Netflix into the tent,” Swinburne wrote.

Boston -- TiVo has entered the 4K game with the Bolt, a connected DVR focused on retail, but it’s also hard at work with set-top partners on  “operator-optimized” products that also support 4K as well as High Dynamic Range, which supports brighter, more colorful video images.

“We are big believers of it, the value proposition” of HDR, Thomas Elam, vice president and general manager of TiVo’s North American service provider business, said here.

And differing from the strategy with Bolt, which will also support HDR when TiVo flips on that capability, TiVo won’t make the MSO-optimized hardware, but will rely instead on set-top makers that have signed on to use its Hardware Porting Kit, a group that includes Arris/Pace, Evolution Digital, Technicolor and Kaon, among others. TiVo, as a reminder, is in the process of merging with Rovi.

Here at the show, Comcast continued to amplify its interest in HDR, showing off a new Xi5 device that will support the format and start shipping in July and complement the Xi6, which will support both HDR and 4K.

TiVo confirmed that it has moved ahead with a pricing adjustment on the Bolt, the 4K-capable, broadband-connected DVR that TiVo introduced last fall.

As spotted by ZatzNotFunny over the weekend, TiVo, starting today (May 2), has cut $100 off the base price of the Bolt and dropped the year of service that was baked into the price when the product was launched last year. 

Under the new pricing, the Bolt with 500 gigabytes of storage sells for $199.99 (versus the original $299.99, while the 1 terabyte version now fetches $299.99, down from $399.99.

New pricing is being updated on the TiVo site as well as through other sales channels throughout the day, said TiVo, which last week inked a $1.1 billion deal to be acquired by Rovi.

TiVo noted that it evolves pricing options as it receives customer input and to meet customer demands. Of recent note, TiVo launched a new version of the Roamio OTA that features more storage and also eliminates the monthly subscription fee.

Tech blogger Dave Zatz, meanwhile, sees the pricing change as a way for TiVo to reduce potential customer churn after the first year following the purchase, though the price will actually be higher for the product if monthly an annual pricing remains $14.99 per month or $149.99 per year. (Multichannel News will update the story once service pricing for the TiVo Bolt is confirmed).

TiVo recently announced that its subscriber base had passed the 7 million mark. The company ended its fiscal Q4 with 6.8 million subs – 5.47 million via MSO partnerships and 971,000 that are retail/“TiVo-owned.”

With Rovi now poised to acquire TiVo, a big question going forward is whether Rovi intends to maintain and perhaps try to expand grow TiVo’s retail business, which features the new 4K-capable TiVo Bolt and its family of Roamio DVRs.

After all, Rovi opted to phase out the Fan TV set-top following its 2014 acquisition of Fanhattan and instead focused on integrating Fan TV’s navigation and discovery software on a wider range of platforms.

Rovi, though, was clear that retail will remain a part of the game plan after it closes the TiVo deal.

“We view this [retail] as a very important channel to be able to maintain focus on,” John Burke, EVP and COO of Rovi, said in an interview. “We think there’s great opportunity there, so we fully expect to continue to leverage that.”

He also said TiVo’s experience in the direct-to-consumer side has also helped the company build better products for its MVPD partners.

TiVo, meanwhile, recent underwent a restructuring that calls for a greater focus on MVPD partnerships and more efficient spending on the retail end.  At the time, Naveen Chopra, TiVo’s CFO, interim CEO and SVP of corporate development and strategy, said his company would spend more resources building new classes of products “that go beyond the traditional DVR.”

Today, Chopra said Rovi is the “right” partner for TiVo in part because Rovi “understands the role and the value, strategically and otherwise, of our consumer business….It was important for us to find a partner that could take that forward and do it in a way where we’re combining it with other businesses that bring a lot of scale and a lot of synergies."

TiVo and Rovi are not yet going into details on how the deal came together, noting that that information will appear in the proxy that will be filed in the coming weeks.

Per The New York Times, the merger was spurred in part by Glenn Welling of Engaged Capital, an activist investor who claimed one of two Rovi board seats about a year ago. At the time, Engaged Capital had been unhappy with Rovi’s financial performance and strategy.  

“It’s a deal that made a lot of sense for both parties,” Chopra said. “It almost doesn’t matter how we ended up there [based on] the fact that we've put together a company that, I think, is going to be a very influential player going forward.”

Burke also addressed how Rovi intends to mix and integrate products from both companies, noting that the plan is to offer the market “best of breed” options. Both companies, for instance, make guides for set-tops and mobile devices, offer data analytics products, as well as search and recommendation offerings (TiVo bought Digitalsmiths in 2014, while Rovi, in addition to the Fan TV deal, acquired voice search firm Veveo in 2014).

Burke said Rovi and TiVo are also aligned on their views of the FCC’s proposed set-top rules. TiVo has been a strong advocate of a successor to the CableCARD.

“The path forward is really all about consumers having a bit more flexibility in how they get access to the services that are important to them,” Burke said.

But there will still be some things to clean up.

TiVo, for example, is working with Comcast on a non-CableCARD solution for products sold at retail; Rovi, meanwhile, filed a patent suit against Comcast and some of its box suppliers after the MSO’s license expired and wasn’t renewed.

Earnings update

Capping off a busy morning for Rovi, it also posted Q1 results. Revenues dropped 12%, to $118.4 million, alongside a net loss of $17.7 million, widened from a loss of $15.5 million in the year-ago quarter.

Looking ahead, Rovi still expects fiscal year 2016 revenue of $490 million to $520 million and non-GAAP diluted income per share of between $1.35 to $1.65. Those figures exclude any revenues from possible renewals with Comcast or Dish Network.

TiVo claims that TV networks are refusing to allow the company to run ads on its new 4K-capable Bolt DVR because they are annoyed with the product’s ad-zapping "SkipMode" feature.  

SkipMode, a controversial component initially offered on TiVo’s new 4K-capable Bolt device and recently extended to TiVo’s family of Roamio DVRs deployed in markets such as Chicago and San Francisco, lets users skip commercial breaks in recorded shows with the click of a button.

Early on, that capability is being supported on almost two dozen channels, including the Big 4 broadcasters, for shows (except for local content and sporting events) that run each day between 4 p.m. and midnight. SkipMode can also work on TiVo Mini boxes that are connected to a Bolt or Roamio.

“We’re totally cool with viewers keeping their cable subscriptions alive and well. But we also understand that commercial interruptions are one of the biggest annoyances for many cable-goers, despite commercials being a source of revenue for the networks,” TiVo said in this blog post dated March 29. “So, when we wanted to advertise the heck out of TiVo BOLT, why did the networks refuse to run our ads? The reason? SkipMode™, one of the TiVo BOLT’s flagship features.”

TiVo’s blog item did not identify any specific broadcasters or cable networks that refused to run ads for Bolt. Multichannel News has asked the company for those and to see if SkipMode is the sole reason for their refusal.

Update: TiVo is not commenting beyond what it said in the blog posting. 

The current crop of SkipMode-enabled channels include ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, AMC, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, TBS, FX, TLC, History, TNT, CW, Food Network, USA Network, Bravo, ABC Family (now Freeform), Syfy, Lifetime, and HGTV.

Broadcasters and other TV programmers historically have not taken kindly to ad-skipping features. In February, Dish Network and 21st Century Fox announced they had settled a lawsuit over the satellite giant’s AutoHop ad-skipping feature, agreeing to disable the feature for seven days after a program originally airs. AutoHop has been a key part of recent carriage negotiations for Dish, which agreed to disable the feature renewing carriage deals with The Walt Disney Co. (which was not part of the 2012 suit) in March 2014 and with CBS in December 2014. Comcast’s NBC Universal unit remains sole litigant in the original AutoHop suit that hasn’t announced a settlement with Dish. 

Notably, TiVo is surfacing this amid a restructuring in which it will reduce retail-focused spending while placing a greater emphasis on MVPD partnerships. TiVo is also reportedly in acquisition talks with Rovi.

TiVo announced that it is offering HBO Go, the premium programmer’s TV Everywhere app, and the kids-focused Toon Goggles VOD service via the new TiVo Bolt as well as its Roamio and Premiere retail product line.

ZatzNotFunny reported in December that HBO Go was coming to the TiVo platform. HBO Go will be available to TiVo users who are also HBO subscribers who get pay TV service from MVPD that authenticate on that platform.

HBO Go will also be appearing on specific MSO-supplied TiVo boxes. HBO Go was referenced in TiVo’s new deal with Buckeye CableSystem. It’s not clear yet when the app will be offered to other TiVo U.S. MVPD partners, which include  GCI, RCN, Grande Communications, Suddenlink Communications and Mediacom Communications, among others.

TiVo is also extending its  SkipMode feature to its entire Roamio family starting Thursday (February 18), and expects to complete that rollout by February 26.

SkipMode, a controversial feature initially offered on TiVo’s new 4K-capable Bolt device and on  Roamio DVRs deployed in Chicago and San Francisco, lets users skip commercial breaks in recorded shows with the click of a button. Early on, that capability is being supported on about two dozen channels, including the Big 4 broadcasters, for shows (except for local content and sporting events) that run each day between 4 p.m. and midnight. SkipMode can also work on TiVo Mini boxes that are connected to a Bolt or Roamio.

TiVo’s MSO business stayed hot in the company’s third fiscal quarter with 418,000 net adds, pushing its MVPD-partnership category beyond 5.51 million subs.

TiVo, which is expanding to pay TV operators in emerging markets via its recent acquisition of middleware vendor Cubiware, said its MSO partnership business in the quarter experienced its strongest growth in 10 years.

While TiVo has seen the bulk of its MSO-oriented growth come from international partners, the company said its business with North  American MVPDs grew 44% across more than 15 mid-sized operators. Digitalsmiths, TiVo’s search and recommendation and analytics unit that counts Charter, Time Warner Cable and Dish Network as customers, also posted double-digit growth, TiVo said. 

“We’re gaining about a million subs every nine months,” TiVo president and CEO Tom  Rogers said in an interview. He said MSO-related revenues in Q3 grew 60% year-on-year, and 47% on a sequential basis. 

Amid the recent launch of the 4K-capable, ad-skipping TiVo Bolt, the company also added 11,000 TiVo-owned subs, expanding that total to 952,000.

Amid the recent launch of the 4K-capable, ad-skipping TiVo Bolt DVR, the company also added 11,000 TiVo-owned subs, expanding that total to 952,000.  Rogers noted that Q3 only included a week to ten days of Bolt sales.

With the MSO and retail categories factored in, TiVo added 429,000 subs in Q3, for a grand total of 6.46 million. 

With both categories factored in, TiVo added 429,000 subs, for a grand total of 6.46 million, up 26% versus the year-ago period. 

On the financial end, TiVo said Q3 service and software and technology revenues hit a record $102.8 million, up 17% versus the year-ago quarter, and near the top of its expected range of $100 million to $103 million.

GAAP Net Income was $5.3 million.  Non-GAAP net Income grew 39%, to $9.9 million, a figure that excluded $1.9 million relating to amortization & earn-outs from Cubiware, $1.9 million of interest expense on the 2021 convertible notes, and $0.9 million loss on the repurchase of 2016 convertible notes, all net of tax. 

"This was a strong quarter of execution and growth,” Rogers, who is stepping down from that role to become non-executive chairman in February 2016, said in a statement. He added that “the turnaround in the TiVo-Owned business continues as we launched the innovative TiVo BOLT and gross additions were up 44% year-over-year, our ninth straight quarter of double-digit growth.”

TiVo will look to amp up retail sales with the Bolt, a new platform that supports 4K streaming, a menu of OTT apps, traditional digital cable video services, and a new “SkipMode" feature that could become a lightning rod of controversy with programmers.

As shown at left, the Bolt sports a new, smaller and arc-like form-factor, but will kick things off with two differently priced models – the 500 Gigabyte version will cost $299.99, while the 1 terabyte model will fetch $399.99. Bolt pricing bakes in the first year of the TiVo service, which will later cost subs 14.99 per month or $149 annually. TiVo and its online retail partners will start taking orders today (fulfillments begin next week), and the Bolt will show up at Best Buy brick and mortar stores starting this Sunday.

Bolt will also contain a CableCARD slot (it’s located on the device’s undercarriage) and, for the cord-cutting crowed, will also allow users to capture free, over-the-air TV broadcast signals. The Bolt is also outfitted with MoCA 2.0 for whole-home capabilities when paired with the $149.99 (non-4K) TiVo Mini, and 802.11ac dual-band WiFi.

Bolt’s 4K support will come way of HDMI 2.0, HDCP 2.2 and the HEVC and VP9 decode formats, and will initially support 4K via Netflix and YouTube.

"I do expect to add more 4K apps as time goes along; we're working on our application partners on that,” Jim Denney, TiVo’s vice president of product management and strategy, said.

Equipped with four tuners, the Bolt also includes on-board video transcoding for streaming of recorded and live TV to Android and iOS devices and Web browsers. Bolt will support one simultaneous stream at launch, though a November software release will unleash a second. The Bolt will add out-of-home streaming early next year, Denney said.

Replaces the Roamio-S

The TiVo Bolt will essentially replace the Roamio-S, which requires the TiVo Stream sidecar for video transcoding, and “likely replaces” the Roamio Plus in the company’s product line, Denney said. Like the  Roamio-S, TiVo also expects to eventually phase out the CableCARD-free Roamio OTA (the Bolt handles OTA signals).

Updated: However, earlier findings tied to TiVo's new platform suggested that TiVo is also developing an "Aereo Edition" of Bolt, suggesting that TiVo might come out with a model that, like the Roamio OTA, supports OTT and over-the-air TV, but eschews the CableCARD. TiVo acquired the trademarks and the customer lists of the now-defunct Aereo service for about $1 million in March

The Roamio Pro, which doesn’t support 4K but packs six tuners and 3 TB of storage, will remain in the TiVo product lineup.  “We’ll split the line,” Denney said. (The 1.9-pound Bolt is 33% smaller than the TiVo Roamio-S and 65% than the Roamio Plus and Pro).

Bolt will start out as a retail product (the device will provide integration with Cox and Comcast VOD), but “you should expect MSO-specific versions of this coming out,” Denney said.

TiVoended its fiscal Q2 with 6.03 million total subs (941,000 TiVo-owned, and 5.09 million through MSO partners).

SkipMode

One feature new to Bolt that should gain lots of positive attention from consumers and possibly negative attention from programmers is SkipMode.

TiVo said the feature, which lets users skip commercial breaks in recorded shows with the click of a button, will initially be supported on 20 popular channels, including the Big 4 broadcasters, for shows (save for local content and sporting events) that run each day between 4 p.m. and midnight.

Channels that are part of that mix include FX, HGTV, History, Lifetime, NBC, ABC, ABC Family, AMC, Bravo, CBS, Syfy, TBS, TLC, TNT, USA, Comedy Central, the CW, Discovery Channel, Food Network and Fox.

To enable the feature, TiVo is creating tags on those channels that identify when programming begins or resumes. Commercial pods will be illustrated on-screen with a bar along the recording line and a pop up will prompt the viewer to press the “D” button when a commercial break is skippable. Users can also select the remote’s Channel Up/Down buttons to skip forward or back between commercial breaks.

“From a consumer standpoint, we think it’ll be a very compelling feature,” Denney said. “To a certain extent, it’s fast-forward perfected.”

Time will tell if broadcasters and other programmers feel the same way, as Dish’s Auto Hop feature for the Hopper DVR drew lawsuits from broadcasters. However, in January, a U.S. District Court said the technology that the broadcast networks objected to is legal under copyright law or the Supreme Court’s recent Aereo ruling. Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's September 2013 denial of a preliminary injunction against Dish’s Hopper DVR service.

Denney said TiVo users are already fast-forwarding through commercials. “What we’re doing is giving them [consumers] a new tool to do what they’re already doing…We’re not affecting any of the underlying content; we're creating the tags to identify where the content begins." 

Other New Features

Thanks in part to a beefier memory footprint, Bolt will support a fast app launch feature for Netflix. While it will take five to seven seconds to fire up Netflix on Bolt the first time, the suspend/resume capability with the Netflix app will reduce that to a second or two, giving it the kind of response time offered by a resident application. That feature is initially Netflix-specific, though TiVo hopes to support it in additional apps eventually. 

With Bolt,  TiVo is also rolling out a freshen up user interface that flattens the graphics, a new color palette, and network logos that will  help users more rapidly identify channels in the lineup. “It’s the TiVo UI with new graphics,” Denney said.

A new QuickMode will playback content at 1.3 times real time with pitch-corrected audio (that will make sure that dialogue played back in that mode won’t sound like Alvin and The Chipmunks).

TiVo is also debuting a new iOS app that will allow users bring more personalization and customization to its What to Watch Now element. While the hobbies and interest feature is only for the YouTube app, customers can now customize by genre across other content sources. The app is also expanding its sharing capability beyond Facebook and Twitter to include email, and links that will also direct users to OTT sources in addition to a portal where they can set a recording.

TiVo is also bringing more speed to its cross-platform (streaming, VOD and recording) OnePass with a feature called Quick Select.

And TiVo’s introducing a new remote that includes RF technology (eliminating the need for line-of-sight).  To help users find a lost remote, a button on the back of the Bolt will trigger the remote to play a song.

Alongside the new features, there’s also something that the new Bolt won’t support early on – the Hulu app.

Denney said that’s because TiVo flipped to an HTML5 app structure. Hulu’s HTML5 app isn’t ready for that platform, but TiVo, he said, hopes to bring Hulu to the Bolt “sometime soon.” 

TiVo rekindled its litigation strategy Tuesday by filing a patent infringement suit against Samsung in the Eastern District of Texas.

TiVo, which announced the suit as it announced fiscal second quarter results, said the complaint centers on four patents, including two that have been litigated previously (its ‘389 Time Warner patent and ‘195 Trick Play patent), as well as two patents that are related to the '389 patent “but have expiration dates further into the future.”

“Today's action should help address one of the questions regarding the value, breadth, and applicability of TiVo's IP portfolio post the 2018 expiration of the '389 patent,” TiVo president and CEO Tom Rogers said, in a statement.

Update: In an interview, Rogers said the two latter patents, which have not been litigated, have a patent license that extends to 2023. He said TiVo’s core patent portfolio, of which there are hundreds, have an average duration of 13 years. 

TiVo’s legal assault on Samsung, a provider of set-tops to U.S. operators such as Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems and a top maker  of video-capable tablets and smartphones, comes after TiVo had successfully settled several other lawsuits. In June 2013, TiVo announced it would get an upfront lump-sum payment of $490 million to settle pending patent litigation with Motorola Mobility (then part of Google) and Cisco Systems, while also settling its suit against Time Warner Cable. TiVo had previously raked in more than $1 billion from past settlements with Dish Network, AT&T and Verizon Communications.

“People know that we have quite a track record when it comes to our litigation and they also know that we don’t pursue these things unless we believe there is significant damage opportunity," Rogers said. 

On the subscriber front, TiVo improved its retail stance while continuing to build its base through MSO partnerships.

TiVo added 37,000 TiVo-owned gross adds in the quarter, up 37% year-on-year, while net additions dropped 3,000, narrowed from a year-ago loss of 2,000 net additions. TiVo also added 284,000 subs through MVPD/MSO partnerships, about what it added in the quarter in the year-ago period.

TiVo ended its fiscal Q2 with 6.03 million total subs (941,000 TiVo-owned, and 5.09 million through MSO partners).

Rogers chalked up TiVo’s latest retail momentum on its whole-home platform, which includes the TiVo Mini. Also playing a part is the growth of streaming services that enable some consumers to build their own bundles in a way they hadn’t necessarily had before, he said. 

Rogers wouldn't shed much light on Bolt, the brand for TiVo's next-gen platform, but acknowledged that there's something new in the works. “I won’t deny that we're going to be introducing a new retail product over the course of the quarter at some point," he said. 

On the financial side, TiVo pulled in service and software and technology revenues of $99.1 million, above it’s guided range of $94 million to $97 million, and improving on $86.6 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenues at Digitalsmiths, TiVo's video search and recommendation unit acquired in 2014, grew 65%.

Net income was $8.3 million, compared to guidance of $7 million to $10 million, but down from $9.3 million in the same quarter last year, which did not include $3.5 million consisting of $1.7 million of non-cash amortization and transfer tax expenses from TiVo’s recent acquisition of Cubiware and tax adjusted interest of $1.8 million from its 2% convertible notes issued in September 2014. Excluding those items, Non-GAAP net income grew 28% to $11.9 million compared to the year ago quarter, TiVo said. 

Cox and TiVo announced Tuesday that they had begun to enable Cox VOD on Roamio and Premiere boxes sold at retail, and this blog post from TiVo (hat tip: ZatzNotFunny) says the rollout is initially underway in Orange  County, Calif.; and Las Vegas, Nev.

TiVo and Cox said that the VOD integration, delivered through a software update, will reach Cox’s entire digital footprint by the end of 2015. Cox is delivering VOD on certain TiVo retail DVR models over IP connections (using Verimatrix DRM, the same Cox uses to deliver IP-VOD to its Contour app for tablets), complementing Cox live TV delivered via MPEG/QAM transport streams and CableCARD security.

Elsewhere on the  TiVo front, ZatzNotFunny reports that the TiVo Bolt, the company’s still unannounced next-gen platform, will include 4K with its feature set (though maybe not on all models in the family), something that could come in handy for customers who have a 4K set and also have access to the Ultra HD libraries of OTT providers such as Amazon and Netflix.

Roamio, we hardly knew ya. TiVo appears to be closing in on the launch of a new family of products that will succeed the Roamio lineup, according to a bunch of evidence that Dave Zatz of the ZatzNotFunny blog has been uncovering in recent weeks.

In addition to trademark filings, CableLabs certifications and artwork from TiVo itself, the stars are aligning to show that the DVR pioneer is gearing up to launch new products under the “Bolt” banner.

Adding to the intrigue are some promotions that include a new Roamio OTA for $49.99 and the option for a lifetime service plan for $249, down from a regular price of almost $500. That’s an indication that TiVo might be looking to unload current inventory to make room for a new line of products.

“It’s really quite the deal,” Zatz writes. “However, the TiVo Bolt could be just weeks away…and we do anticipate it will replace the Roamio.”

TiVo launched its initial Roamio product lineup in August 2013, and followed about a year later with the OTA version.

TiVo isn’t commenting on what’s going on with Bolt, though Zatz hears that it will involve a “substantive design refresh.” But TiVo materials do indicate that there will be a flagship product under the “Unified Entertainment System” banner, as well as the TiVo Bolt Aereo Edition.

TiVo, which nabbed the trademarks and the customer lists of the now-defunct Aereo service for about $1 million in March, has been talking up plans to offer a “legal” version of Aereo… and a Bolt-branded product/redesign might be what it has in mind. Back in May, TiVo hinted that it would its announce its new Aereo-related plans sometime in July, and that time has passed.