TIVO develops its platform internally. The guts of its software, which is what counts, are proprietary. Any usage of 3rd party on the hardware, which is increasingly irrelevant anyhow, is incidental. This is not the case with Horizon. Re-read the link I offered which explains there are ~30 vendors that were required to come together to make the platform a reality.
We are at a tipping point globally where MSOs are beginning to realize that spending hundreds of millions of $$ on internally developed UIs/platforms is not an astute, ROI-generating use of investor capital. It would be akin to telcos such as ATT, VZ, etc. demanding that any hardware used on their networks be their own proprietary devices. In essence, good-bye iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, etc. and hello ATT Smartphone. Imagine that type of world! Well, that's exactly the world a pay-TV subscriber lives in, a world of an exceptionally sub-par user-experience, all because the MSOs have historically believed they should control the ecosystem and develop their own UIs.
The pace of innovation outside of the pay-TV ecosystem and its convergence into that same eco-system is accelerating so quickly that the MSOs have NO other choice but to admit the reality we see in telco land at ATT and VZ that they've historically been in denial about - they are UTILITY companies not software companies and the best use of their capital is to generate incremental subscribers paying incremental $ / month to maximize the utilization of their networks! TIVO accomplishes this.
TIVO is one part MSFT (Windows), one part Google (search/suggestions/potential future ads), one part Nielson/CommScore (massive value from viewing habits of subscribers in real time), etc.
Anyone in denial of what's happening here is failing to see the forest and is focused on the trees: pay-TV is the last bastion of tech innovation as it's all been mined everywhere else and TIVO lays at the fulcrum point/intersection of all that innovation....a gate-keeper of sorts.
This will be one of the most valuable publicly-traded companies in the world in 7-10 yrs.
