Tivo (as both noun and verb) has long been synonymous with PVR (Personal Video Recorder) it's the kind of brand recognition owned only by the likes of Scotch Tape, Coke and Ski-Do.  Tivo has earned it; carving out the digital video recorder niche back in the late 90’s.  But despite the revolutionary idea of merging a hard drive with a user friendly programming guide, Tivo's seen some ups and downs.  I've taken shots at Tivo in the past as an extra fee for something that comes with many set top boxes for the satellite and cable TV.  Tivo is built on sound technology offering subscribers a great product if they use rabbit ears or a rooftop antenna.
 
Tivo’s biggest growth area has been providing its service to DirecTV subscribers with a version of their set top box dubbed DirecTiVo.  But at January’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) DirecTV announced the deployment of several receiver’s that will take advantage of a competing digital recording format by NDS Group.  This significant blow to Tivo is offset by the March 15th announcement of a deal with Comcast Communications to develop a Tivo box for Comcast Cable subscribers.  This could be good for Comcast subscribers as Tivo's strength is its intuitive programming guide system with built in search and record features.  Cable receiver's programming guide systems are too often a clunky bug ridden experience, offering customers a Tivo option can only be good for consumers.  The Comcast announcement came only a week after a shining report that Tivo’s subscriber base has doubled to more than 3 million in the last year.  Unfortunately for Tivo some 62% of this subscriber base is from DirecTV, according to Bruce Leichtman of Leichtman Research Group:

"It was a nice chess move for Comcast, and the loser is DirecTV. Murdoch [Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., which owns DirecTV] could have taken the TiVo brand name as his. Now he has lost that."

Is everything really so rosy at Tivo?  Although Comcast subscribers stand to gain, the losers could be Tivo subscribers according to Alex Rowland of Democracy in Media who says:

“…let me explain why this (Comcast) deal will eventually suck for TiVo and its customers… TiVo has had an internal power struggle between two camps for some time. One camp, led by Ramsay, felt that TiVo needed to focus on generating substantial (i.e. profitable) monthly fees on TiVo services, while (most importantly) retaining control over technology direction (i.e. ability to innovate). The second camp has been all about driving consumer growth through carrier channels (as it turns out, at almost any cost.) It appears that this internal struggle has run its course and the latter group has prevailed. I believe that this is a bad thing for TiVo’s customers, and therefore a bad thing for TiVo in the final analysis.”