TiVo Slashing Prices to Grab Subscribers

The TiVo (TIVO Quote) personal video recording service will be 50% cheaper for many of its subscribers Nov. 1.

TiVo's monthly fee will drop from $9.95 per month to $4.95 per month for current and future TiVo users who subscribe to the service through the DirecTV home satellite service, according to TiVo and DirecTV, which told subscribers about the switch over the Labor Day weekend. DirecTV will make the TiVo service free to its highest-paying video customers, says a DirecTV spokesman, and will drop the $249 "lifetime subscription" option.

Coming as part of a restructured relationship between TiVo and DirecTV -- and accompanying the introduction of a new DirecTV satellite receiver with TiVo's technology built-in -- cutting the subscription price discount is likely to boost subscriptions to TiVo during the all-important holiday season, say outsiders. Though TiVo is nearly eponymous with personal video recorders, or PVRs (in some circles, akin to Netscape Communications in the early days of World Wide Web navigation), the company has struggled to ward off competition and recover from its prior history of free-spending ways and less-than-comprehensible consumer advertising.

TiVo's shares fell 15 cents to trade at $3.92 Tuesday, down 50% from the company's 52-week high.

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