TiVo continued to lose money, but management boasted Tuesday that its service and technology revenue rose sequentially for the first time in six quarters.
The company that made DVRs standard household equipment lost $34.4 million in the fiscal fourth quarter that ended Jan. 31, up from a loss of $9.9 million a year earlier.
Revenue sunk 19% to $55.8 million, but when sales of hardware — oftentimes subsidized — is stripped out, revenue was $41.4 million, a slight increase over the previous quarter but still down from a year ago.
TiVo continued to bleed subscribers, ending the quarter with 2 million, down from 2.3 million in the previous quarter and from 2.6 million a year ago.
Still, management — and Wall Street’s TiVo bulls — are hopeful that an eventual win over EchoStar/Dish in a patent-infringement lawsuit that has dragged on for years will be the catalyst TiVo needs to get to profitability.
TiVo is also suing AT&T and Verizon, and is fending off lawsuits from those two as well as EchoStar, Microsoft and Motorola.
“It goes without saying that there’s no change in our view of our intellectual property and the value it could yield for our shareholders,” TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said Tuesday.
Rodgers also was touting the company’s television measurement business, which seeks to earn money in a way similar to Nielsen, which TiVo doesn’t usually mention by name but refers to as the “industry currency.”
“We have been evangelizing that there are better ways of measuring television audience viewing behavior, and we believe marketers have started to listen,” Rogers said.
TiVo shares fell 4% Tuesday to $9.82 and were off another 2% after the closing bell when its quarterly results were released.
