TiVo just keeps chugging along ahead of the pack. After yet another “better than expected” profit report, many people are asking how this brand keeps its market share. When cable companies are offering their own digital recording and playback services, how can TiVo keep coming out strong?

Well, step one is to partner with the competition. TiVo is doing exactly that. The company currently has agreements with DirecTV and Canadian telecom giant, Cogeco Cable, and is enthusiastically striving to land more partnerships. And that strategy seems to be working. Demand for the set-top boxes continue to be high and subscriptions to the service climbed to 4.8 million last quarter.

But joining the competition is not TiVo’s only effective strategy. It’s also going after a drastically underserved market – people without cable. Recently, TiVo launched a video recorder with an antenna that enables users who don’t have cable or satellite TV to record shows from over-the-air channels and video streaming services for less than $15 per month. As you may imagine, revenue and subscriber lists continues to rise.

Buried beneath all these good decisions and positive results is a single unifying success factor. Messaging. Somehow, TiVo has convinced cable companies they need to work with TiVo instead of against them, while convincing thousands of customers they don’t need cable at all. Sure, that might sound dichotomous, but what it really is, is taking a chunk out of two opposing markets.

So is TiVo the “Great Uniter” or the solution to the nation’s cable TV complaints? It’s far too early to tell. But what we can know is that this brand has found a way to make something that shouldn’t work be very profitable. And the common denominator is how they approach both their competition and their market.