November 4th, 2005
Google Acquires Tivo?
By Mark Evans
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Should Google buy Tivo? Motley Fool’s Rick Aristotle Munarriz thinks it’s a good idea because Google could present targeted ads to Tivo users because it would know what you’re watching and where you live - hmm, that’s a troubling idea in some ways, eh? Buying Tivo would give Google a foothold in the TV market and it would only cost $500-million or so. ZDnet’s Russell Shaw buys into Munarriz’s idea, adding Google/Tivo could create “one-to-one specials channels based on individual users location and viewing habits”. Shaw says a local Google salesforce would the sell AdWords or AdSense placements to advertisers looking to pursue specific customer groups.
We Say: Google has a war-chest of $7-billion and it has a clear interest in television so buying Tivo would be an interesting strategic foray. Larry Page and Sergey Brin should throw caution to the wind - easy to do when you’re billionaires - and buy Tivo before someone else beats them to the punch.
For more thought on Tivo-Google, click here.
Technorati Tags: Google, TiVo, RealTechNews
eric n. says:
In theory it sounds like a good idea… but what’s holding back AAPL, or MSFT from picking TIVO up?
TIVO’s current Market cap seems insignificant to GOOG.
I wonder how this would work.
Google uses their system to track users, feed heavily focused advertisements to individual’s or family’s watching TV. Tie all your google accounts together and use BI to figure out what you’re interested in… custom channels created just for you… hmm. I’ll stop before I go too far.
November 4th, 2005 at 8:02 pm
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
Google Acquires TiVo?
Mark Evans of RealTechNews writes: Should Google buy TiVo? Motley Fool’s Rick Aristotle Munarriz thinks it’s a good idea because Google could present targeted ads to TiVo users because it would know what you’re watching and where you live - hmm, that…
November 5th, 2005 at 12:36 am
Ralph says:
TiVo has a poison pill that would effectively prevent anyone from buying the company on the open market, and the probability that TiVo’s board would accept a “friendly” offer of $500M is exactly zero. You would have to offer $1.3B to $1.6B to even get them to consider an offer, and a premium like that would take a lot of justification for the buying company.
On the other hand, after what eBay just paid for Skype, anything is possible.
November 5th, 2005 at 9:03 am
Glazi says:
Ralph, i think you position on valuation is wrong. given the current price of the stock and some recent troubles with DirecTV i think the shareholders would accept anything between a 25-30% premium over the current price, or something around $6.25/share. That puts $500m in the right ballpark.
The reason i suspect Google may not have pursued this is they have been very careful to choose services and deals that fold into the core competency. Software based indexing is their forte and they are smart enough to realize this. All the deals they’ve pursued are easily integrated into the primary product.
TiVO might be an enticing concept, but it is another market entirely. Odds are they can figure out a way to deconstruct and incorporate TiVo software, but why not just come up with a generic web based tool that anyone from anyservice to upload a list of watching preferences to a Google server? You’d get all the benefits without acquiring $500m of dead weight.
November 9th, 2005 at 8:46 am
aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural south. says:
Universal fools
I didn’t comment on Monday’s TiVo To Go announcement - extending it to iPods and PlayStation Portables - because I thought it a nonevent. Who cares? Apparently, at least one network does: “TiVo appears to be acting unilaterally, disregarding establi…
November 22nd, 2005 at 8:16 pm
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