It's always strange when a company that's become synonymous with its market—like Kleenex to tissues, or Xerox to copiers—starts fading. And that's exactly what's happening to TiVo, whose subscriber level has dropped to where it was in 2004.
This from TiVo's SEC filing for last quarter, which shows the company losing 314,000 subscribers in the period, capping more than year an a half of fairly steady decline. They lay claim to just 8% of the roughly 38m active DVRs in the US right now. This is not great.
The TiVo name is so common that most people don't have the sense of the turmoil behind it, but it's very, very real. TiVo's boxes, even if they are some of the best DVRs around, have started to feel stale in the past year, and for most people, cable-co-supplied boxes are simply Good Enough. Basically, they need something exciting, to customers and to TV providers, and they need it soon—that cascading cash river from Dish isn't going to flow forever. [TV By The Numbers via Crunchgear]