Last May, TiVo attempted to muscle in on Roku and Amazon with an HDMI streaming dongle of its own — the $70 TiVo Stream 4K, which traded in the company’s traditional live TV + DVR functionality for the likes of Sling TV, Netflix, HBO and YouTube. It now appears that attempt was so unsuccessful, the company’s planning to abandon its Android TV dongle efforts entirely.
Xperi Holdings CEO Jon Kirchner explained in an earnings call (via Zatz Not Funny) that it no longer feels it can compete using Android TV — the company likes to think its differentiator is a content guide that surfaces and lets you search for shows and movies across a variety of apps, but now that Google’s already baked something like that into its new “Google TV” layer on…
