TiVo said its board has unanimously elected Enrique Rodriguez to president and CEO.

Rodriguez, who assumes that role effective today (November 13), succeeds Tom Carson, who announced his intention to retire in May. Carson, who led Rovi through its merger with TiVo last fall, is also stepping down from the TiVo board, but will stay with the company as an advisor through the beginning of Q2 2018 to assist with the CEO transition.

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Rodriguez takes the helm of TiVo more than a year after the merger with Rovi, and just weeks after TiVo introduced a new lineup of retail products that support voice-powered navigation. Earlier this month on TiVo's earnings call, Carson stressed that the company had “moved well beyond a hardware company,” as the bulk of its revenues are now coming way of software, services, advertising and licensing.

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Rodriguez most recently was EVP and CTO of AT&T’s Entertainment Group unit, coming on board there in 2015 to oversee U-verse and DirecTV and to head up the technical integration of those services.

Prior to that, Rodriguez was group VP of Sirius XM, and was SVP and GM of Cisco Systems’s Service Provider Video Group. At Cisco, he was one of the leads on Videoscape, a multi-screen video initiative that Cisco introduced in 2011 at CES that is now offered through a suite of products under the “Infinite” brand.

Rodriguez is also late of Microsoft, where he served in positions that included corporate vice president for the TV Division and as VP of Xbox partnerships. Before his time at Microsoft, Rodriguez spent more than 20 years at Thomson/RCA.

“Enrique is an exceptional leader and strategist who has the energy and passion that will position

TiVo for success,” Jim Meyer, TiVo’s chairman of the board of directors, said in a statement. “He knows the company and our industry inside and out, and will be able to move quickly with implementing initiatives that we believe will position the company for future success and add value for our stockholders.”

“I am honored to be selected by the Board for this opportunity to lead TiVo and its employees, and I look forward to the company’s next phase of growth,” added Rodriguez. “The opportunity for TiVo is enormous, and my focus will be on accelerating the innovation that our customers demand to help usher in a new era of entertainment, while adding value for our stockholders.”

TiVo’s business has been rapidly shifting from hardware to software, and that business shift was clear as day in the company’s third-quarter results.

“TiVo has moved well beyond a hardware company and is now an innovative entertainment technology company,” Thomas Carson, TiVo’s president and CEO, said on the company's earnings call Thursday (Nov. 2). “To that point, 95% of our revenues this quarter came from software, services, advertising and licensing.”

Though it’s not a core focus, TiVo is still keeping its hand in the retail hardware business amid the launch of a new lineup of Vox-branded products that add voice navigation and a new user interface.

RELATED: TiVo Refreshes Retail Lineup With Voice-Powered 'Vox' Devices

TiVo said Q3 revenue rose 29%, to $197.9 million, driven by the merger between TiVo and Rovi that closed last fall. That was paired with a net loss of $17 million, versus net income of $49.9 million a year ago that factored in a $83.4 million tax benefit. TiVo expects full-year revenue in the range of $810 million to $830 million, with about $35 million coming from hardware sales.

Carson, who plans to retire from the company (a search for a successor is ongoing), reiterated that TiVo’s business now covers three categories: Platform Solutions (user experience software for pay TV operators in developed and emerging markets); Software and Services (metadata, advanced search and recommendations, voice search and advertising); and Licensing.

Though TiVo has made progress on that last category, having signed recent deals with AT&T and Liberty Global, the overhang continues due to the lack of a deal and a protracted legal battle with Comcast.

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Getting Comcast under license “remains one of our top priorities,” Carson said. 

Regarding the pending action at the International Trade Commission, Carson said TiVo expects a final determination to be issued on Nov. 9.

Rovi’s acquisition of TiVo went through without a hitch last week, but now comes the hard part — integrating and shaping the new company and its product lines, and determining its long-term retail strategy.

Many of those questions are still to be answered as the new company, which is keeping the TiVo name and giving the Rovi brand the boot, starts to act on a plan expected to generate $100 million in synergies.

“The near term for us is really about pulling the two companies together and trying to get them humming as best we can,” Tom Carson, president and CEO of the new TiVo, said last Wednesday (Sept. 7), the day the $1.1 billion deal was closed.

“We’ll go through each of the product lines — everything from traditional set-top box guides to Internetconnected guides to search [and] recommendations technologies, all of the [areas] where you have overlap, and figure out what is best-of-breed and how do you want to optimize all of those solutions,” Carson said. “No decisions have been made on any of the product lines.”

Also to be decided is the future trajectory of TiVo’s retail strategy. TiVo was apparently still pushing ahead in that area before the deal was wrapped up — Federal Communications Commission documents show that TiVo is developing “Mantis,” a network DVR product with integrated over-the-air TV capabilities that is seemingly targeted to cord-cutters.

“The consumer business is something that is still of interest to us,” Carson said. “Having product in consumers’ homes is beneficial on the product development side and can help us with the products we develop for service providers.”

But Carson said the trend with service providers — to offer hardware-agnostic software, apps and interfaces — is an angle TiVo will also consider for its retail business. If there are questions about how to go forward, “it’s about what’s the right hardware strategy for the consumer business,” he said.