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TiVo and AMC Theatres are now getting into streaming, too

By Andrew Blustein, Reporter

October 15, 2019 | 3 min read

A company best known for its ad-skipping DVR service and a giant movie theater chain are the latest entrants in the streaming wars that are spreading beyond the legacy entertainment field.

TiVo was at the forefront of ad-free TV; now it has an ad-supported streaming service

TiVo was at the forefront of ad-free TV; now it has an ad-supported streaming service

TiVo came online in 1999 with a digital video recorder that lets viewers fast forward through ads on recorded TV content. Today (15 October), seemingly in response to the abundance of streaming services eating up the on-demand TV market, the company has launched its own ad-supposed streaming service, called TiVo+.

The free TiVo+ is only available on TiVo Edge, the company’s streaming device, and it will feature myriad content from the likes of TMZ, America’s Funniest, Gannett, Newsy and Jukin Media.

AMC Theatres also announced its own streaming service today, hoping to offset the 3.6% drop in US cinema attendance over the first half of 2019.

AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the world, has launched AMC Theatres On Demand. According to The New York Times, it struck deals with studio giants Disney, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros to populate the service with new and catalog releases.

Movies will apparently cost between $10-$20 to buy and $3-$6 to rent. The movie theater operator plans to leverage its loyalty program of more than 20 million subscribers, AMC Stubs, to market the new service.

“With more than 20 million AMC Stubs households, and with our website and smartphone apps already being visited hundreds of millions of times annually by movie fans, AMC Theatres is in a unique position to promote specific movies with greater personalization than has ever been possible before,” said Adam Aron, chief executive officer and president of AMC Theatres.

“Through the launch of AMC Theatres On Demand, we can reach movie lovers directly and make it easy for them to access films digitally.”

Each AMC partner, however, has its own direct-to-consumer streaming operations to worry about.

Disney is in the midst of a major “basically everything” marketing push for Disney+, slated to launch 12 October.

Paramount (ViacomCBS), Universal (Comcast) and Warner Bros (AT&T) are all key pieces in their parent companies’ portfolios as content becomes a competitive differentiator in the streaming age.

Meanwhile Sony controls Playstation Vue, a so-called skinny version of a traditional cable offering, and has a minority stake in streaming service Crackle Plus.

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