Tivo has concluded their long sought deal with Netflix to stream over 12,000 movie titles to your home, this via standard Tivo DVR's. In addition to the Roku player and LG Blu-ray player, both currently available, Tivo plans to support Xbox 360 by late fall of this year.

Also, according to Steve Swasey, Netflix's VP of Corporate Communications. The company hopes to stream its content directly to television sets by the end of 2009.

Is Tivo positioning themselves as the bridge between lean forward and lean back entertainment in the living rooms of the U.S.? With over 100,000 titles in the Netflix library, the Tivo/Netflix deal has a way to go before this loss leader strategy for Netflix starts to impinge on their existing business model, would they want to abandon mailing discs in the future in favor of VOD?

But Tivo has been experiencing churn as subscribers leave the platform, this reflected in the chart below which illustrates a loss of 178k subscribers ending July of 2008, this verses 145k in the prior quarter.

Their overall market penetration is still small compared to the total universe of DVR's in the marketplace. In addition, with the U.S. in a deep recession, what impact will home budget constraints have on entertainment equipment and services?