From the consumer's perspective, what is TiVo? TiVo is a new way to watch television. The consumer can decide his or her own “television destiny” by taking control of the networks. TiVo is a more efficient and convenient way to watch what you want, whenever you want. What factors impact its adoption? Analyzing the internal stimuli of the buyers, I would say that a big impact is reference groups, in the specific primary groups such as family and friends. Once a consumer becomes a user, he or she mostly recognizes the advantage of TiVo. Among early adopters, 72% of owners admitted that TiVo made their TV viewing a lot more enjoyable and 90% would recommend TiVo to their family and friends. Furthermore, to the question “were you more influenced by retail or friends,” 57.5% admitted they were affected by friends. I also think that demographic data shows that age and occupation play important roles in adoption. Most of the users were between 25 and 44 years-old, which probably meant they were more oriented to technology and innovation. Occupation also played an important role as most of the users had an income higher than 51k, and a big chunk of this group earned over 100k per year. What factors make adoption difficult?
Although TiVo could count on product reliability and effectiveness in distribution by the partnership with Sony and Philips, price and awareness were two of the main causes producing the 0.04% of market penetration. Awareness by consumers both of brand and category was negligible and therefore a big problem for TiVo adoption. People didn’t entirely understand what TiVo was and did, but ironically TiVo was easier to use than explain. There was in fact a lot of variance in the way TiVo was sold by the sales persons. For instance, in-store demonstration and explanation of TiVo’s features depended on the sales person; the sales