“Whatever Happened to TiVo?” 📺

Last week I posted about Blockbuster, which led to a discussion of Blackberry. Apparently I'm now doing a full nostalgia tour of companies that once felt unstoppable 😄

At lunch yesterday, a friend reminded me of another great one:

TiVo.

Whatever happened to that company? 📺

For a while, TiVo felt like absolute magic.

If you’re a millennial or Gen X-er, you probably remember:
- pausing live TV for the first time
- recording entire seasons of shows
- skipping commercials
- rewinding live sports

At the time, it genuinely felt futuristic. And for a while, TiVo completely cornered the DVR market. They launched in 1999 and became synonymous with a new way of watching television. People didn’t just own TiVo. Oh no, they “TiVo’d” things. You know you've made it when your brand becomes a verb or noun!! (like Kleenex or Bandaids)

The crazy part is: TiVo was right about the future. People did want:
- on-demand viewing
- control over content
- personalized entertainment
- fewer commercials (why are commercials coming back??!? 🤬)

But then technology moved even faster than TiVo itself. Cable companies built DVR functionality directly into their boxes. But the real death knell came when streaming arrived:
- Netflix
- Hulu
- YouTube

Suddenly nobody needed to record television anymore… because television itself became on-demand.

TiVo helped teach consumers how they wanted to watch content. But streaming ultimately made the DVR obsolete. Which is one of the strangest lessons about technology:

Sometimes the companies that invent the future don’t end up owning it.

Ps- there’s an entire generation now that will never understand the panic of accidentally deleting your recorded shows to free up storage space. ...or remember VHS tracking... or moving the antenna arms to get the "best signal"... 🤗🥹