Netflix, TiVo start streaming agreement

December rollout planned for DVR owners

By Danny King -- Video Business, 10/30/2008

OCT. 30 | Netflix and TiVo reached an agreement allowing owners of TiVo digital video recorders to stream Netflix's movies and TV episodes directly to their TVs, marking Netflix's continued efforts to make its digital content available to TV watchers through various electronics components.

Netflix and TiVo, which first agreed to work together on content distribution four years ago, today started to test the service with "several thousand" households with TiVo's Series 3, HD and HD XL machines, the companies said in a statement today. The service, which provides DVR owners access to about 12,000 of Netflix's digital titles, will be broadly available in early December.

"Subscribers to Netflix and TiVo are avid movie watchers, and this combination gives them immediate access to all of the great content available through TiVo and the thousands of additional choices available to be streamed instantly from Netflix," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in the statement.

Netflix, the largest U.S. movie-rental service via mail, has been trying to boost subscribers by augmenting its by-mail offering with an expanded inventory of titles through its streaming service and partnering with component makers to allow the streamed content to be accessed directly from TV sets.

Last week, Netflix and Samsung reached an agreement allowing owners of Samsung's Blu-ray Disc players to stream Netflix's online video, following a similar agreement with LG Electronics in July.

In May, Netflix introduced a set-top box allowing customers to stream from an inventory of what was about 10% of its 100,000 titles. Later that month, Hastings said products such as Netflix Player by Roku, which had to be back-ordered within three weeks of its introduction, would double the company’s subscriber base within a decade.

Since then, the company also has announced agreements to carry video-streaming content from Liberty Media's Starz movie channel, Walt Disney's Disney Channel and CBS.

TiVo has been turning quarterly profits this year by cutting marketing costs and expanding partnerships that make its machines more widely available by, among other things, bundling them with high-definition TVs and giving them to Comcast customers in certain parts of the country.