Xperi Corp. said it has signed a second "top 10" smart TV OEM to deploy its TiVo-branded TVOS in Europe.
Reporting first-quarter earnings Tuesday, the San Jose, Calif.-based technology company said it wasn't ready to offer any specific details, most notably who the original equipment manufacturer even is.
Xperi said TV's from the double-secret mystery OEM would start rolling out, initially in Europe, sometime in 2024.
Also read: Xperi CEO's Bold Declaration: TiVo OS Will Power 7 Million Smart TVs By 2026
The announcement of a second OEM partner comes more than eight months after Xperi announced an OEM deployment deal with Istanbul-based Vestel, which was supposed to start this ongoing spring rolling out smart TVs in Europe under the brand names Daewoo, Regal, Hitachi, Telefunken and JVC.
That rollout has now been delayed until later this year.
"While our software stack is ready, given market dynamics and based on retail planning with Vestel, we now expect the first shipments in Europe to be in the second half of 2023, in preparation for the holiday buying season," Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner told equity analysts during Tuesday's earnings call. "This will have no impact on our guidance for the year, as only a small amount of monetization revenue as expected in late-2023."
In November, Xperi also signed a deal with China's Shenzhen KTC Technology, a top-six OEM manufacturer of flat-panel displays, which will use the TiVo reference designs in its sets enabling future TVOS deployment deals.
Xperi is pitching its Linux-based TiVo operating system solution as a more flexible alternative to smart TV makers that don't have the wherewithal to create their own UX, offering more monetization and customization features relative to Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Google TV.
"We expect to have a footprint of at least 7 million TVs powered by TiVo within three years, which would yield an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $140 million, while delivering meaningful margin expansion over time," Kirchner told equity analysts back in February.
So it would seem the announcement of a third OEM partner would need to occur more quickly than eight months from now. And Xperi needs to start getting its TiVo TVs into the market.
Certainly, in its competitive quest to join the highly competitive race for gateway control of the global connected living room, Xperi has its doubters.
"That's not a significant player right now in TiVo, and it's hard for me to imagine that a new entrant would be able to gain the necessary scale and technology -- and just size of the of everything -- that's needed to be in that business. It would be quite difficult," Roku CEO Anthony Wood remarked in February.
Xperi reported $127 million in Q1 revenue, up 7% year over year. Here's the company's Q1 earnings release.
