TiVo, the US equivalent of Sky Plus is coming to the UK after signing an agreement with Virgin Media that will see Virgin become the exclusive distributor of TiVo services and technology in the UK.
The news, broken during the American companies earnings results will see a “long-term, strategic partnership with Virgin Media,” says Tom Rogers, President and CEO of TiVo.
According to the two companies the deal will involve TiVo developing a converged television and broadband interactive interface to power Virgin Media’s next generation, high definition set top boxes.
This isn’t the first foray into the UK market for TiVo. The company ventured into the UK market in 2000, when a two-year agreement with BSkyB. BSkyB later dropped the technology in favour of the NDS XTV system that is marketed as Sky+.
Virgin Media currently anticipates its first TiVo co-branded product in 2010.
TiVo also made news today after announcing an “audience research agreement” partnership with Google that will see TiVo share anonymous viewing trends collected from its base of subscribers with Google. Google will use that data to help its advertisers understand who they’re reaching — and who they aren’t — when buying television ads through the company’s AdWords TV Ads system.
Very, very bad news – I’m glad you picked up on this story since the media has largely ignored deep packet inspiration (otherwise known as the biggest threat to the Internet). DPI is a very bad, very dangerous technology and people need to be educated about it rapidly.
This comment was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com