Why Tivo should buy Vudu

Vudu has closed down their hw business and stated they would like to be a platform deployed to multiple customers.  OEM'ng your engine is a typical last ditch effort to preserve the worth of the IP - it allows you to call on all your potential acquirers in a straightforward manner.

I believe it would be a mistake and is unviable.  There just aren't the partners out there.

A good partner would be someone who could operate the store and hw and profit from the synergy.  They would have to have a compatible platform, have their engineering team in the bay area and have the possibility of having the movie distribution contracts portable.  It would also help if they weren't squeemish about porn as I bet that is a nice growth area for Vudu.

The scraps of the WebTV team are still down in Mt. View as MSFT but code isn't portable, contracts probably wouldn't stick.

Cisco could buy them for code + team but I don't think the brand + back-end service would be worth anything to them.

Real might be an interesting acquirer but I'm not sure they have the bucks to even support integration and relaunch.

Roku is a possibility but it doesn't enhance the utility play - more of an about face for the netflix strategy.

Dish's Sling group is in Foster City.  The video distribution patents coupled with the recent cablevision DVR case provide a really interesting play for Dish.  

I like Tivo.  While it puts them in competition with some of their partners, it also provides a platform.  Wouldn't a peer-to-peer distribution system be much cheaper for Netflix than streaming?  We'll see - I hope it doesn't all just die....