# Lets hope Cisco don't dump Tivo



## jonphil (Aug 7, 2002)

Cisco are planning to close down the successful Flip Video arm of the business and concentrate on business instead.
Lets hope that Tivo isn't seen as a consumer market Cisco want to drop too as they only supply Virgin and don't sell direct to us.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13052370


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Cisco provide the back end stuff for Virgin ; I doubt they see TiVo as "consumer", but as part of their business ith Virgin.


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## M_at (Dec 10, 2000)

Cisco purchased Scientific Atlanta back in 2005 and it compliments their cable infrastructure products.

Standalone pocket video cameras were never really part of Cisco's core product offering and I' amazed this didn't happen sooner.

TiVo is safe because it's not Cisco's. It's TiVo's and they've got a solid contract with VM to continue providing middleware. We may see non Cisco badged Virgin boxes powered by TiVo later.


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## deshepherd (Nov 30, 2000)

M_at said:


> Cisco purchased Scientific Atlanta back in 2005 and it compliments their cable infrastructure products.
> 
> Standalone pocket video cameras were never really part of Cisco's core product offering and I' amazed this didn't happen sooner.
> 
> TiVo is safe because it's not Cisco's. It's TiVo's and they've got a solid contract with VM to continue providing middleware. We may see non Cisco badged Virgin boxes powered by TiVo later.


Possibly the unusual part of this story is Cisco bought Flip and the shut it down making the staff redudant. I spent ~3 years in "Silicon Valley" at the end of the 99/00 "dot.com bubble" - I was relocated to work for that time on a project we were working on with another company based in their offices in San Jose which were right on the edge of the Cisco "empire". At that stage Cisco were growing hugely - constant building site on the Cisco land as they continually built new identikit buildings to expand into (seem to think at one stage it was almost one new builing coming on line each month). And one of the main methods they used to recruit new staff was to take over companies, scrap all the current products they were working on and reassign the staff to Cisco products (I think the people compared this to the Borg assimilating people in Star Trek TNG!) - i.e. they bought companies on the value of the employees that they'd acquire rather than the products. Maybe something of the same reasoning was behinf their purchase of Flip ... just that this time with a bit of a downturn they realized that they didn't need the extra staff anymore so the easiest way to slim down was to ditch the as yet un-assimilated Flip?


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