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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.
This is a total aside but you've reminded me: I couple of years ago I switched from cable TV to just using broadcast and bought a new HD Homerun tuner capable of receiving 4K OTA broadcasts.
Imagine my shock that these new broadcasts are DRMed. HDHomerun can't decode them. I don't blame them, I'm absolutely incensed that OTA broadcasts have been allowed to start using DRM.
> Maybe if they went with there own premium streaming service
If you don't own the content, you get squeezed. Hulu, Spotify all of these guys get nickle-dimed into oblivion.
Netflix understood this deeply creating one of the biggest, successful pivots in startup-dom
Normally, I would just ignore small typos, but since you made the exact same mistakes consistently, there is a chance you are actually unaware, and will benefit from pointing this out:
> if they went with there [should be “their”] own premium streaming service
> Plex's Pass + Live TV service could of [should be “could have”] been there [should be “their”] subscription revenue
> a TiVo competitor to HDHomeRun's devices could of [should be “could have”] replaced their DVR revenue
You may like this app, it can combine live tv with local files and DVR functionality with HDHR
I held onto my TiVo for as long as I could until Spectrum forced me off.
I switched to AT&T Fiber but was keeping my Spectrum TV service just for my TiVo. When I called to turn off just Internet with Spectrum they terminated both. When I called to get them to turn my cable service back on they refused to reactivate my Cable Card that the TiVo uses. Since they were no longer required to support them, no new activations were allowed. I’m sure that played a huge part in this. Other providers like satellite or fiber TV had no obligation either.
Being able to pay $2.50 / month for a cable card and then use my TiVo with multiple minis around my house rather than paying per room to the cable company was great for years.
But YouTubeTV is excellent too. The only thing I miss is the ability to save recordings for as long as I want or record anything I want. There were some I kept for years and YT only lets you keep them for a few months.
Going to hijack a thread... is there any chance one could point a Plex server at a different backend (in the hosts file) and then emulate Plex's own functionality? So tired of the internet going down and not being able to log into my own shows.
It's interesting/sad how we've gone from media that allowed for home recording, where it was both possible and legal, to what we have now.
You can't even make a backup of the shows and movies you "buy", which just means "license", today.
I've gone back to physical media. Vinyl, CDs, Blu Rays and DVDs. I just buy what I like. I don't need a huge library, that actually gives me "choice paralysis" and I end up not watching/listening to anything.
I still use Internet based services, for example I might find a new band because someone on Instagram posted about them. Or maybe I listen to an album on streaming before deciding if I'm buying it. Oh and some live music venues have Youtube live streaming (e.g. Smalls jazz club). With movies, of course I might watch a movie trailer or a review on YouTube.
Speaking of movies, the situation is different because unlike music, I can't actually find most of my favourites on streaming services. However more often than not, you can rent them online, so I might rent (but never buy!) a movie through Apple, YouTube etc., then if I like it and think I want to watch it again, I will buy a Blu-ray. But I kinda gave up on pure streaming services such as Netflix etc. since their catalogue is so shallow.
This obviously doesn't work for everyone, if your way of listening to music is just "Hey Alexa play a smooth jazz playlist while I cook" then of course streaming is the right thing for you. Same if you just like to watch movies casually and you're not a film buff, in that case Netflix & co. are OK.
My biggest recent shock: ATSC3, the over the air broadcast standard that enables 4K broadcasts, allows for DRM. OTA broadcasts now locked down and can't be easily recorded. Shocking.
Looks like as we got a lot of more media it became more ephemeral - social media posts that impossible to find, snapchat/insta stories, disappearing slack history. Some of this is feature, not a bug.
Personally I _never_ wanted to watch same movie twice, but I can understand some would. I guess most are still accessible in some archive somewhere for a small fee. I'd guess that fee is far less than you hoarding it for 4 decades.
I mean, you can, but not allowed to, legally...
> TiVo has stopped selling Edge DVR hardware products,” the company said in an AI-based message.
What does this actually mean? An AI-authored press release? A customer support bot message?
It means “please we need some of that sweet AI VC money”
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.
I agree. TiVo was awesome back in the day. I wish they had made a chromecast device earlier on.
I think they could have been a much better Roku.
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])
Interestingly, TiVo didn't do Tivoization, instead they let you run modified GPL software but broke the proprietary software when run on top of modified GPL software. Basically an early form of attestation.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
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?
In some ways, it's more like Disney getting out of silent movies or Microsoft stopping shipping software on floppy disks - or cell phone makers giving up on dumb phones or Apple discontinuing iPods.
The market for DVRs has shifted a lot and while TiVo's system was wonderful, it's hard to get people to pay you a monthly fee for a service that's included for free with your cable package. Companies are often offering networked DVR service with unlimited storage - they record it in their data center and you just stream it later.
TiVo really needed to pivot and simply didn't. TiVo should have become another Roku, but they were probably worried about cannibalizing their DVR revenue. They had the operating system and hardware to beat Roku to the market - or even become the primary alternative to Roku for years after Roku had launched. Roku launched in 2008 and TiVo could have followed. FireTV and AndroidTV launched in 2014 so there was a huge window in there for TiVo (and Chromecast was 2013 so that doesn't change things much).
TiVo was focused on getting individuals to pay them $X per month for service. Roku figured out that it would be a lot easier to get all the streaming companies to give them a cut rather than getting it from the end users as well as being a platform to serve ads to end users.
If TiVo had looked at Roku and said "we can do that even better," they would have had a very different future. TiVo launched a Roku competitor in 2020 based on AndroidTV, but that was way too little and way too late. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, TiVo had an absolutely amazing OS. They needed to release a Roku competitor stripped of the DVR bit for the cord-cutting streamers. They needed to pivot their business model toward the service-revenue-cut and ad-revenue model that Roku went after. They needed to see that cable and satellite was a dead-end as those companies would try to cut them out of the loop with their internal DVR products (and even if TiVo were better, most customers wouldn't want to pay extra for it).
TiVo should have pivoted 15 years ago and become one of a couple dominant streaming box players. Instead, Amazon and Google followed Roku into the market even though TiVo had 6 years to enter that market and had a polished OS and great reputation at the time. TiVo feels a bit like Nokia. Nokia ignored smartphones long enough that they kinda faded away - and then their effort was too little, too late.
Netflix stopping DVDs by mail?
Nintendo getting out of playing cards.[1]
AT&T getting out of telegraphs.
> AWS pushing for on-prem?
They have! https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
More like Enron or Circuit City announcing they’re closing corporate headquarters.
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.
I loved TiVo 20 years ago when it was relevant, but honestly I had no idea they were still around
They're not, at least not really. From Wikipedia:
In April 2016, Rovi acquired TiVo for $1.1 billion.[8]
In December 2019, it was announced that TiVo would merge with Xperi Corporation. The merger completed in May 2020.[9]
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.
Agreed it was great ergonomics. It should not be too difficult to replicate with existing offerings. I wonder if anyone has one that could be scanned for replication by 3D printing.
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.
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.
>and not being able to transfer the recordings was a huge pain.
Except you can[0], and I have for decades.
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.
Another way of looking at it is that it's becoming not ubiquitous, but extinct. In streaming, an ad-skipping device is too customer friendly to be allowed to exist. Everything the tech industry recreates is more user-hostile and privacy-invading than its pre-existing counterpart. Cable didn't innovate unskippable commercials.
I always wanted a TiVo, but by the time I could actually afford (and use) one, Hulu was at it's prime.
Now Hulu is being shuttered
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.
Mandatory naked gun reference:
https://youtu.be/ZNU5b-iI8v0
TIL TiVo is actually a real thing and not just something made up for Tropic Thunder
The new Naked Gun mentioned it too
First RealPlayer, now this!
Tablo TV is perfectly positioned to become TiVo’s successor.
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.
I felt similarly about my MythTV setup at the time. It was quite a pain to set up, having to acquire a TV decoder with hardware compression to make reasonable use of disk space without losing frames on the 400mhz boxes of the day. MySQL database, TV programming service subscription, IR remote receiver, etc.
But the commercial skipping used a set of a dozen filters for things like black screens, volume changes, logos in the corner, and bayesian analysis to nail every single commercial transition. It was flawless.
"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.