CNet.com has a piece up on its website that talks about how networking equipment giant Cisco Systems might be looking to acquire TiVo, the digital-video recording pioneer. The article, which is labelled “news analysis” — which in the journalism business is code for “speculation” — starts off with Cisco’s recently announced $6.9-billion acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta, one of the largest makers of set-top boxes in the world next to Motorola, and then asks the question “Who’s next?”

One response might be “Why should anyone be next?” The purchase of SA is one of the largest acquisitions Cisco has ever done. The idea that it’s going to rush out and buy something else right away is more than a little wacky. But a better response might be “Why TiVo?” As much as everyone seems to want to see TiVo get snapped up by either Yahoo, Google or Microsoft, I’m not sure that’s as likely as TiVo fans might want it to be — and I think a purchase by Cisco is probably even less likely (The Stalwart isn’t convinced either).

Why? Because — as Rafat Ali also points out at PaidContent.org — TiVo doesn’t really bring anything to the table that Cisco doesn’t already have with Scientific-Atlanta. Yes, it’s true that TiVo (and Replay TV) pioneered the DVR business, and the company has a small legion of devoted fans who love the extra features it provides. But when it gets right down to it, DVRs are a commodity, SA already makes them — including ones that do high-definition, and have interactive features for integration with the Internet (or the ability to add them) — and so there is little or no reason to pay the $500-million or whatever it would take to buy TiVo. For what it’s worth, I think the idea of Cisco buying Nintendo makes even less sense, but maybe that’s just me.

Personal video recorder company TiVo Inc. said Monday that it plans to roll out a new feature that will allow users to choose certain commercials, based on keywords, and then have them inserted into TV shows that they have recorded with their TiVo (Dave Zatz has a description of how this would work, taken from a patent application by TiVo).

That might sound a little odd considering one of the main benefits of having a TiVo is that you can fast-forward through the commercials, but it’s obvious that the PVR company is trying to find new revenue sources and is willing to consider just about anything. This new feature sounds a lot like an attempt to create a kind of Google AdWords model, but with TV instead of the Internet.

Is that even possible? Carl Howe, a former Forrester Research consultant, says he thinks it is “a brilliant idea,” — the Googlization of TiVo, he calls it (he goes even further to say that he sees Google buying TiVo because of the information it will be able to collect based on its new advertising model). Others disagree.

Om Malik, for example, notes that paying users of TiVo — who are already paying for something that others can get for virtually nothing through the PVR offered by their cable company — might be less than enamoured with the new service. AdWords works for Google because its main service is not only free, but is so useful that people don’t mind having ads served to them, not to mention the fact that the act of searching is more closely aligned with targeted ads than, say, the act of watching CSI:Miami.

Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek is also skeptical, as is Cynthia Brumfield from IPDemocracy. And I would have to say I am too — TiVo’s move seems more like a Hail Mary pass by a struggling company than anything else.

Here’s a column I posted at globeandmail.com about rumours that Yahoo might acquire TiVo:

“In what was no doubt a welcome ray of sunshine for shareholders of TiVo, the maker of personal video recorders announced a deal with Internet portal and search engine company Yahoo, which will allow TiVo owners to click a TV listing on Yahoo’s pages and automatically record shows on their PVR. This gave a small boost to TiVo’s somewhat beleaguered shares, but unfortunately the warm glow of the deal didn’t last for very long — the shares lost ground on Tuesday, the day after the announcement, and are still down by more than 50 per cent from their peak early last year.

Not surprisingly, the deal with Yahoo renewed the speculation that TiVo might be an acquisition target — if not for Yahoo then for Google, or Microsoft, or AOL, or maybe your Aunt Phyllis (that last one is just a joke). It might be stretching things a little to say that behind every TiVo takeover rumour there stands a disgruntled shareholder, but at this point an acquisition of the company seems to be about the only thing that might breathe some life into the share price. Although it more or less invented the PVR market, TiVo hasn’t been able to capitalize on that “first-mover” advantage, and so has been forced to watch the world pass it by.

Would a takeover by Yahoo, Google or Microsoft make things better? No doubt it would for TiVo shareholders. But will it happen? Anything seems to be possible in the tech sector at the moment — just look at the similarly unlikely $4-billion (U.S.) deal between eBay and Skype — but the odds of a rich takeover of TiVo coming any time soon don’t seem particularly high, despite the latest arrangement with Yahoo.

One of the reasons why news of the deal failed to spark much cheering could be that TiVo has offered users a similar service for more than two years, either through the company’s own website or through a deal with America Online that TiVo signed in 2003, which offers similar features to the deal with Yahoo. Neither one of those has produced much in the way of added revenue or profit for the PVR maker, which is what makes some analysts skeptical of the bottom-line impact from the arrangement with Yahoo.

Susquehanna Financial Group, for example, said in a research note that while it sees the Yahoo deal as positive for TiVo, “we believe these announcements are more likely to increase customer satisfaction as opposed to attracting a material number of new subscribers.” Doing the latter, the brokerage firm said, is “critical to TiVo’s future growth.” Susquehanna said that its rating on the stock remains “negative.”

The companies mentioned that as part of the deal, users would be able to get access to other things from Yahoo on their TiVos, such as photos (Yahoo bought Vancouver-based photo-sharing service Flickr earlier this year), traffic reports and weather. But it wasn’t clear when those services would be coming, or how much TiVo would have to pay for them. As a result, Susquehanna said it would be “more of a churn reducer than a subscriber acquisition vehicle.”

As for a takeover, there has been plenty of talk but nothing more. In February, TiVo’s stock soared by 17 per cent in a single day based on a rumour that Apple was going to buy the company. Cable and entertainment companies have also been rumoured as potential acquirers, including Time Warner, Comcast and Liberty Media. Why someone would want to buy the company when they can get the same benefit more cheaply by doing a licensing deal with TiVo — the kind of deal Comcast has already done, and that DirecTV used to have — is never really explained.

The rumours and speculation about Yahoo, Google and Microsoft seem to be based on the idea that these companies could turn the PVR company into a kind of WebTV-style portal to the Internet, blending the television with the Web. Apart from the fact that trying to do just that with WebTV has been an unmitigated disaster for Microsoft, which has poured hundreds of millions into the effort for virtually no return, it’s not clear how buying TiVo — as opposed to designing their own TV box or doing deals with cable companies (several of which Microsoft has invested in) — would help them make that kind of strategy work.

One of the alternative theories is that Yahoo, Microsoft or Google might be able to use TiVo as a kind of TV portal for Internet video content — which all three companies have been trying to become the leader in indexing — by allowing users to find video clips on the Web and then play them through their TiVo boxes. But then, people can do that already using their computers without paying an extra fee for a TiVo box, and if they have a media PC they can connect it to their television quite easily. And even if Yahoo or Google had that kind of thing in mind, they still wouldn’t need to buy the entire company in order to make it happen.

Of course, none of this is going to stop TiVo investors from dreaming of a nice juicy acquisition. But they are likely to remain just dreams.”

So Yahoo and TiVo announced a deal in which users of TiVo (why is the “v” capitalized? just wondering) will be able — under certain circumstances — to click a listing at Yahoo’s television-listing portal and have their TiVo record a show (if you’re Canadian, or any non-U.S. resident for that matter, don’t plan on having this ability until you are old and grey, unless you are already old and grey, in which case you will have to wait until you are dead). They will also reportedly have the ability to view Yahoo Photos on their TV and to see traffic reports, news and other services as well.

My colleague from the National Post, Mark Evans, theorizes that this might be the precursor to a Yahoo acquisition of TiVo (and Russell Shaw at ZDNet thinks so too, apparently), but I have to say that I don’t really see the logic. It’s obvious why TiVo might be interested, since the company has been struggling on its own, especially since its major partner DirecTV cut the PVR-maker loose and decided to see other people (the new services won’t work on DirecTV TiVos). And I can see why Yahoo might want to find more eyeballs for their content — but that doesn’t mean it has to buy the whole company. TiVo is losing market share to regular cable boxes with PVR functionality, and it’s not clear that aligning itself with Yahoo would change the situation dramatically.

Om seems skeptical as well, and notes that this feature has been available to AOL users for almost two years, something also noted by Good Morning Silicon Valley and Real Tech News.