Digeo is set to lay off 80 staff, about half its workforce, and scale back on some of its more ambitious products, and take on a new CEO.
Digeo is a cable TV set top design company founded by billionaire Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, which designed the award winning Moxi digital media recorder (DMR), a term it had hoped to catch on which manages set top functions, multi-room DVR, acts as a DVD player, offers casual gaming, photos, news and stock tickers, all in one Linux box.
The HD version of its Multi-Room HD device is now canned, as is the Home Cinema Edition. So far through US cable operators including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Adelphia and Charter, it has 420,000 installations. The company made its early inroads at Charter, because Paul Allen also controls that cable operator.
Last week the company announced partnerships with Flickr, Finetune, Accedo and CloverLeaf at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and we assume that these deals would not have been announced unless they will survive the changes at the company, and it looks like a new strategy under fresh prudent management means Digeo will not try to invent everything itself, but take the best of what’s out there via partnerships.
The truth is that what was revolutionary back in 2004, has become commonplace in 2008, and other set top builders can do most of what Digeo was preaching, and do it cheaper and on a larger scale.
Access to internet held services, like video and Flickr held photos, are creeping into many set top products, and Apple TV 2.0 (see elsewhere in this issue) targets some of the same space. Digeo might have targeted the intellectual property arena, licensing its designs to other hardware manufacturers, but instead opted to bypass cable operators and go straight through retail, rather like TiVo. That tactic has yet to work. Digeo has also offered the interface on a PC, but this is another move also paralleled by other equipment designers. The failure of Digeo to even look outside its home USA base, may have, in the end, contributed to what is now likely to be its downfall.
Other features like multi-room DVRs are now embraced by Pace, Motorola and Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco and this week it dropped the Scientific Atlanta name)
CEO Mike Fidler voluntarily stepped down as CEO and will be replaced by COO Greg Gudorf. The original CEO Jim Billmaier, stood down in 2005.