Earnings: TiVo Swings To Q3 Profit On EchoStar Suit; Q4 Loss Expected To Widen
This story was written by David Kaplan.
TiVo's $105 million in damages from EchoStar (NSDQ: SATS) after a lengthy court battle get the credit for the DVR company swinging to a profit in Q3, with $100.6 million ($0.98 per share) versus last year's $8.3 million loss. Without the EchoStar compensation, though, *TiVo* would have just narrowed its loss in Q3 to $900,000and the company warned investors that its Q4 net loss will likely widen to a range between $10- to $12 million. By comparison, TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) lost $6.4 million in Q407.
While revenues were down 14.7 percent to 64.4 million, TiVo beat the *Thomson Reuters* analyst poll estimates of $50.7 million in revs and a loss of $0.6 per share (via AP). In addition to reporting on Q3, TiVo also announced a new mobile site, m.tivo.com, which will let subs use their cellphones to search for and record TV shows (see our sister site, mocoNews.net, for details). More after the jump.
Release | Webcast | Transcript (via Seeking Alpha)
-- During the conference call with investors, TiVo touched on the difficult economic situation and said it was trying to get costs under control and pointed to an announcement last week that it would reduce its workforce by 7 percent. The company also said it sliced the costs of attracting customers by more than half to $139 from $304. In terms of growth, CEO Tom Rogers pointed to distribution deals with *Netflix*, *Comcast*, *DirecTV* and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.
-- Despite the partnerships, subscribers tied to DirecTV (NYSE: DTV), Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) and Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), dropped by 135,000 sequentially from Q2. As for TiVo's own subs, that number fell by 28,000 in Q3. Its overall subscriber base was at roughly 3.5 million by the end of October.
By David Kaplan