TiVos used to be great and unique, but ever since the core DVR functionality was obvious after the fact and everyone copied the feature, and then streaming came in, there was little unique, especially on the hardware side.
For OTA recording, I've used Windows Media Center but it went out of support, and more recently the HDHomerun DVR, which both worked decently.
An odd progression. What's next? Disney getting out of movies? Google giving up on search? AWS pushing for on-prem? Microsoft shipping quality software?
TiVo was one of those clever incremental improvements that comes out and becomes ubiquitous. I remember a friend having it in 2001ish and it was so cool at the time.
TiVo OTA was great. Our unit eventually croaked, and we've gone full old-school: use the antenna, and what is on is on. Sure, we do have streaming services too, but for specific hours during the day, it's just OTA.
I always felt TiVo really did a great job at identifying how important good UX and UI are for consumer products. Partially, the monopolies/cable companies knew/know they were able to get away with poor UI since consumers didn't really have a choice when it came to cable providers/cable boxes so it wasn't hard to beat them, but TiVo did actually do a good job.
I felt like they had consumer awareness at one point. Maybe if they went with there own premium streaming service, as oppose to only trying ad-based streaming services (like Pluto) OR continuing to try to make money charging people monthly for a subscription to use a device they first have to purchase.**
Instead they kept the old business model and went to more of a business-to-business service oriented offerings. Selling metadata, APIs, TV Guides, Car infotainment, all oddities IMO as most IPTV providers like to use turn key solutions.
I actually use the Tivo Stream 4K as my smart device. Works great, gives me 4K, can download Android TV apps, and is cheap $35.
Not a fan of ad-based TV (which is the Tivo+ thing, like Pluto, etc...), but I use it mostly for YouTube, Plex, etc.
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*: My Plex server uses my HDHomerun for live tv; TiVo could have been both if it was more open. A TiVo competitor to Plex's Pass + Live TV service could of been there subscription revenue, and a TiVo competitor to HDHomeRun's devices could of replaced their DVR revenue. They could take the Tivo Edge, open it way up (as the HDHomeRun takes cable and give you actual m3u8's; this lets you decide where you view or record TV, and makes the device actually useful for commercial deployments as well (offices, restaurants, dorms, hotels, etc...). Pretty much: add features similar to Plex (i.e. combining my OTA/Cable recordings with my local media) + Plex's Live TV (Tivo already has the richest data and a sleeker guide) and combine the Tivo Edge CableCard and OTA in one device. This would appeal to many users, bring the hardware price down as it's one model, and provide them with both revenue streams like they are used to.
I once had a NAS entirely comprised of salvaged TiVo drives that ran for a surprisingly long time. For some reason around '04 I kept finding them in curb trash walking down the street, a lot were direct tv branded iirc. Never really found out why but also didn't look very hard.
Ironically never once actually used a TiVo but still RIP was a cool idea and I got free drives out of it.
DIRECTV had a box that had integrated satellite tuning and EPG. I don’t know what happened to that service, but my guess is the service ended around the time you found the HDDs available?
TiVo had a few experimental features and NBC helped test them. You could press the TiVo button to record the show that was being advertised by a commercial for Friends, if the TiVo logo prompted you.
ReplayTV was the TiVo before TiVo and its commercial skip was the best bar-none. I was sad when it basically died and had to get a TiVo which was a good product made by folks I knew but at the end of the day, nothing could beat ReplayTV's skip not even the secret way to turn on 30-sec skip on the TiVo. Kind of crazy how antiquated all this stuff is now.
As a non-American I only know TiVo from the term Tivoization [0]. So the company had its use for me as well I guess.
("Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware." [0])
I am a current TiVo customer, and this is sad news. I use TiVo to record over-the-air TV transmission. TiVo software is great, it is the only usable UI these days. Compare it to Google TV for example. TiVo's UI is mostly text and some images, while Google TV is mostly images and some text which I find unusable.
One of the most delightful products I've ever owned. Almost perfect UX (to this day my wife and I refer to fast forwarding as 'bi-bipping' in reference to TiVo's sound effects), and there was a time when coming home to a random episode of Star Trek it had sought out was exciting and felt satisfyingly personal. Now everything is available on demand and all of the temporal problems that TiVo solved don't exist anymore, but it's rare to see a device so well designed in its niche.
"Now the company wants users to watch ads before viewing their time-shifted content. TiVo plans to roll out so-called "pre-roll" ads on all recorded content…"
Nope. It was nice while it lasted, but just look where it ended up.
Best TV remote ever made. The peanut remote. So comfortable and easy to hold. Because of its shape you could tell where you were holding it along its length and it could never slip from your hand. You could even tell if you picked it up backwards because it was heaver in the back from the batteries. I used it for at least 20 years and I'll always miss it.
I seem to be the only one here that didn't have a good experience with TiVo. My parents cut the cord in 2013 and got a Roamio with a couple of the smaller streaming boxes. It was fairly easy to set up, but the UI was slow and not being able to transfer the recordings was a huge pain. Those stream boxes though, God those were terrible. If you had to reboot them it would take at least 20 minutes, if they didn't hang in the process.
I had a much better experience integrating a PC with a couple of PCIe Hauppauge tuners running Windows Media Center with a couple of Xbox 360s as streaming devices.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 65.5 ms ] threadFor OTA recording, I've used Windows Media Center but it went out of support, and more recently the HDHomerun DVR, which both worked decently.
What does this actually mean? An AI-authored press release? A customer support bot message?
You can't even make a backup of the shows and movies you "buy", which just means "license", today.
I felt like they had consumer awareness at one point. Maybe if they went with there own premium streaming service, as oppose to only trying ad-based streaming services (like Pluto) OR continuing to try to make money charging people monthly for a subscription to use a device they first have to purchase.**
Instead they kept the old business model and went to more of a business-to-business service oriented offerings. Selling metadata, APIs, TV Guides, Car infotainment, all oddities IMO as most IPTV providers like to use turn key solutions.
I actually use the Tivo Stream 4K as my smart device. Works great, gives me 4K, can download Android TV apps, and is cheap $35.
Not a fan of ad-based TV (which is the Tivo+ thing, like Pluto, etc...), but I use it mostly for YouTube, Plex, etc.
--
*: My Plex server uses my HDHomerun for live tv; TiVo could have been both if it was more open. A TiVo competitor to Plex's Pass + Live TV service could of been there subscription revenue, and a TiVo competitor to HDHomeRun's devices could of replaced their DVR revenue. They could take the Tivo Edge, open it way up (as the HDHomeRun takes cable and give you actual m3u8's; this lets you decide where you view or record TV, and makes the device actually useful for commercial deployments as well (offices, restaurants, dorms, hotels, etc...). Pretty much: add features similar to Plex (i.e. combining my OTA/Cable recordings with my local media) + Plex's Live TV (Tivo already has the richest data and a sleeker guide) and combine the Tivo Edge CableCard and OTA in one device. This would appeal to many users, bring the hardware price down as it's one model, and provide them with both revenue streams like they are used to.
Ironically never once actually used a TiVo but still RIP was a cool idea and I got free drives out of it.
TiVo had a few experimental features and NBC helped test them. You could press the TiVo button to record the show that was being advertised by a commercial for Friends, if the TiVo logo prompted you.
("Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware." [0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
Nope. It was nice while it lasted, but just look where it ended up.
I had a much better experience integrating a PC with a couple of PCIe Hauppauge tuners running Windows Media Center with a couple of Xbox 360s as streaming devices.
Except you can[0], and I have for decades.
[0] https://github.com/lart2150/kmttg