Luke Bouma, writing at Cord Cutters News:
In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content.
That lede is no exaggeration, at least in my life: TiVo really did change the way I watched TV forever. Not only did it make time-shifting easy, it also finally gave users real tools to avoid the onslaught of commercials that was really ramping up at the time.
Prior to the TiVo, I had a VHSVCR that I had to manually schedule to record shows I couldn't watch live, but it even tried to identify and skip commercials. It was neat, but TiVo was on another level entirely. TiVo's "Season Pass" feature, which recorded the shows you were interested in no matter if the schedule changed, was amazing. So too was the "Recommendations" feature, which introduced its "Thumbs Up" and "Thumbs Down" buttons, which one would use up to three times per show to tune the results to indicate how much you liked or disliked a show. It was very satisfying to tell it you really didn't like a show with three thumbs down in succession; each thumb was accompanied by a deep "gong" sound. TiVo's original show guide is honestly still better than just about anything out there, all these years later. Clear and responsive, with nothing trying to steer you towards what it wanted you to watch, it was a precise tool for finding what you were looking for.
And the Crown Jewels: the peanut remote and its skip forward and back buttons. The remote is, again, still the best I've ever used. It was ergonomic and intuitive, and most of all responsive. You hit the "skip back" button and replayed the last few seconds. With today's online controls, it's hard to convey how different and revolutionary that was at the time. Likewise, you could skip forward, allowing one to (very controversially) skip commercials.
TiVo was embroiled in lawsuits for a long time, and battled to get integrated into cable and satellite systems (oh, the fights with the cable company to get a working CableCard for later TiVos). It really was a dream machine for users, but the television and advertising industries just hated it. Most of all, TiVo's leadership just lost its way. It failed to innovate after winning its place in our living rooms, a shock given how innovative it was to begin with. It got slow. It constantly charged high subscription prices for its services. It tried to pivot away from made it great. They even kept messing with the interface that had been so good.
Along the way, they also went through a series of acquisitions, and eventually—and sadly—went from defending their patents to wielding them, essentially becoming patent trolls.
Still, the original ideas and design were good enough to keep it my primary TV watching device until just a few years ago, when I finally cut the cord altogether.
RIP TiVo, the device that changed television.
