TiVo Acquires Digitalsmiths

29 Jan, 2014 By: Chris Tribbey

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DVR service TiVo Jan. 29 announced it’s acquiring cloud-based content discovery company Digitalsmiths for $135 million in cash, adding a company that has relationships with seven of the top 10 pay-TV providers in the nation.

Executives said the acquisition gives TiVo a better opportunity to commercialize cloud-based services and technologies with operators, both independently and in conjunction with TiVo’s current user interface.

Digitalsmiths’ cloud-based service integrates search, recommendations, discovery and browsing for pay-TV operators on set-tops and numerous platforms, including iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation and Roku. Digitalsmiths’ Seamless Discovery product — which offers personalized viewer preferences for pay-TV customers — is currently available in more than 100 million households worldwide.

“We’re really excited on more than one front,” said Jeff Klugman, EVP and GM of products and revenue for TiVo. “One is they have really led the industry, not only as a compelling source of metadata, but more significantly in the way they’ve built out their APIs [application protocol interfaces] in a way that operators can easily and efficiently execute that metadata, and do it very, very quickly.

“As a result, they’ve built relationships with the top operators in the United States.”

Digitalsmiths’ cloud service managed nearly 150 million transactions in December 2013, and its time-based and mood metadata includes more than 11 million data sets for personalized video discovery.

“Both Digitalsmiths and TiVo share an acute focus to improve the consumers' viewing experience, and we understand the importance of the 'service' or 'cloud' to achieve this goal through next-generation personalized video discovery solutions,” said Ben Weinberger, CEO and co-founder of Digitalsmiths.

Separately, TiVo announced it’s increasing its current stock repurchase authorization by $100 million, bringing its unused repurchase capacity to $186 million.

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