TiVo Rides Into the Sunset

TiVo’s simple magic changed TV forever — now the iconic DVR is fading into history.

After 26 years and countless designs, TiVo announced it is ceasing the manufacturing of its iconic DVRs. It’s one of those announcements that is hard to believe at first, given the immeasurable impact TiVo had on the TV industry and the general public.

TiVo didn’t invent the DVR, but it perfected it with a dead-simple design both with its software and remote control. TiVo was technology for everyone and took complex ideas and made them so simple to use. Back in the early 2000’s, there wasn’t a way to simply record shows on TV outside of a VCR. TiVo’s rise because of its simplicity changed all that. You searched for your desired program instead of endlessly scrolling through a TV guide. Once you found your show, you set it to record. The genius was you could also create a “season pass” that recorded every airing (just new episodes or reruns too) regardless of timeslot, channel, or anything else. Ideas like this were game-changing. You didn’t need to know what time or channel, or day your show was on. TiVo had your back.

Another innovation was the “wish list” that let you create searches and automatically recorded items that matched that criteria. This was very handy for me because I’d want to record anything with “delorean” in the description or “Islanders” for hockey games because the games aired on different channels.

It’s impossible to state how mind-blowing it was to see TiVo in use the first time. I vividly remember staying at a friend’s house and getting a quick 5-minute demo of their TiVo. He turned the TV on to whatever was live and then he hit the Pause button on the remote. I was blown away. That revelation that I could actually pause live TV was akin to unlocking a super power. I could rewind to any time in the last 30-minutes that I was on that channel. I could watch a recorded show while it recorded something currently airing. I could start watching a show that was currently recording and watch it on a delay! In those few minutes I was given a walkthrough, I was sold. After arriving home the next day I promptly went to my local electronics store and purchased my own Series 2 TiVo.

The “trick play” features as they called it were my favorite. If I started watching a show 10 minutes after it started airing, I could fast forward through all the commercials and end up at “real time” by the time the show was over. Better yet, if you knew the “secret” code on the remote, you could change the function of the “skip to live” button into a 30-second skip button, perfect for commercials. While intentional or not, hiding this feature and its omission on the surface was what kept TiVo out of the courtroom.

For years, TiVo’s main competitor was Replay TV. Replay did all the things TiVo did but would automatically skip commercials and even remove them altogether from recordings. For consumers, this was amazing. For advertisers and networks, this was a threat. TiVo avoided those issues and because of its fun user interface, it became THE way to record your programs.

TiVo achieved what many companies only dream of: becoming a verb. You didn’t “set your DVR to record American Idol”. You “TiVo’d American Idol”. It was that good. The software had fun blips and bloops as you moved through it and its peanut-shaped remote control was super comfortable to use.

For me, I was very into the whole TiVo scene during that decade. I became a daily reader and poster to the TiVo Community forum, joined the beta testing groups, referred enough people to get a free TiVo, and even became aquaintances with their spokesperson Shanan. I remember how thrilling it was to replace a dying hard drive in my TiVo using instructions I found online, learning how to format and “bless” it and seeing the familiar black TV mascot come onto the screen once my self-service upgrade turned my 40-hour TiVo into a 200-hour machine.

The lightning in a bottle wouldn’t last. Streaming began to hit the scene with Netflixreleasing House of Cards. Initially TiVo did support Netflix streaming through a budding App Store, but the apps were clunky, slow and lacked all the polish of the native system. As time went on and more streaming services debuted, it rendered TiVo less and less relevant. Pile on the release of cheap Roku and ChromeCast devices and TiVo had serious competition in the streaming space. And then Apple released the redesigned AppleTV box that was (and remains) the best streaming device on the market. Watching live or even recorded TV became less and less frequent as more shows were streaming only.

TiVo really missed the boat on streaming when it was primed to be the device everyone could use. It was in millions of homes, each one paying a monthly subscription fee or a huge one-time Lifetime fee. TiVo could’ve worked harder and better on the streaming experience. It had a window of time to stay ahead. All its advantages were squandered. DVRs got cheap enough for cable companies to give them away or even offer cloud DVR systems so if your hardware had to be swapped, you wouldn’t lose your recordings. Eventually the cost of a TiVo box plus the service just didn’t make sense.

I, sadly saw the writing on the wall about 5 years ago. I had a TiVo Bolt for less than a year with lifetime service. I wanted to use it but also needed to consider the cost of subscribing to cable TV in order to do so. Knowing streaming was a cheaper option, my TiVo sat in a closet for years. Eventually I sold it so someone could get some use out of it. When I’d shipped it off, it was the first time I’d not owned a TiVo in nearly 15 years. I was a bit sad about it, but TiVo no longer had anything to offer me.

TiVo was truly lightning in a bottle. It was a huge leap in technology at a time before streaming but when people wanted better solutions than recording to VHS. It was the right place at the right time. But just like the Blackberry and Blockbuster and countless other dynamos, their time came to an end because society moved on. It’s not surprising that TiVo stopped selling DVRs but I’ll always wonder how things could’ve been different. If TiVo had seen streaming as the next big thing and fully-embraced, my guess is they’d be more relevant. Instead, streaming was a bolted-on terrible, un-TiVo-like experience that nobody, even a big fan like me, ever wanted.

RIP TiVo hardware. You were one of the good ones.

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