Digital video recording service TiVo is said to be talking to search kings Google and Yahoo about a potential deal—one that could provide an additional avenue for the exposure of adult entertainment. If the joint venture comes to fruition, it could open the door to the possibility of consumers being able to search the Web for videos and playing them on their TV sets.
“I guess it would come down to ease and functionality,” says Fabian Citraro, who runs the adult television service XTV, about possibly playing your Web-found clips or films on your TV set. “There are major players that could come in and make it interesting. But we’ll see how fast people would take to it; there’s only 3 million people using TiVo now.”
Citraro also suggested that how much adult material would be allowed to pass through such an option might depend on how much pressure is brought to bear by critics or activists against adult material.
“Is there going to be heat from the certain groups who’d say, ‘Look, TiVo and Google or whoever are making it easier for my kid to search porn?’” he asks. “Yahoo had to pull their porn ads, Google backed out of [making room for amateur adult] video on their [new] service. Just because TiVo and Google might hook up later, it doesn’t mean porn is going to be easily accessible, whereas with someone like [XTV], we’re a private network, and once you have our box, you can have a limitless supply of adult material.”
Published reports indicate that the option of downloading video from the Web and playing it on your television set is just one idea TiVo might kick around with the search engines, with other possibilities believed to include equity investing in TiVo by the search engines or even an outright acquisition of the digital video recording service.
None of the three players is commenting publicly about any discussions involving TiVo for now, according to published reports. But those reports also suggested any deal between TiVo and a major Web searcher would mean expansion opportunities for both sides, considering TiVo’s long-familiar ambition of becoming television’s Google and Google and Yahoo’s recent heavy investment in video services.
