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The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo

Posted by timothy on from the better-to-be-verbed-than-knighted dept.

gjt writes "For the couch-potato geek, one name typically comes to mind: TiVo — the company that invented the DVR, and with it, timeshifting. TiVo has been around for more than 10 years now. And TiVo fans (like myself) tend to love TiVo. Yet, despite being well-loved and despite having been around longer than the Apple iPod, TiVo comes nowhere close to the iPod/iPhone's success. Apple sells more iPod and iPhone products in a single quarter than TiVo has sold in the entire lifetime of the company. At its peak, TiVo had only 4.4 million active users — that was over three years ago. Now TiVo the number is about 2.7 million. So I wanted to find out why TiVo hasn't been more successful — especially with a seeming lack of competition on store shelves. I did some research and posted my finding about TiVo's past, present, and future. The key takeaway seems to be that TiVo is a victim of cable industry collusion, loopholes in FCC regulations, and, of course, plenty of their own mistakes."

1 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. H.T.P.C. killed the Tivo Star by djdevon3 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest a correlation of Windows Media Center's rise vs. Tivo's fall. I wanted to build an HTPC the first time I saw what XPMCE could really do. This was expanded with Vista Media Center (which I built my first HTPC with). Win7 is now a great choice for building your own cheap HTPC. Yes building a dedicated HTPC is more expensive but in the long run you won't be tied to a proprietary console and limited storage (plus a litany of other things). Very similar argument to console gaming vs pc gaming.

    Now, you got yer MythTV lovers, Windows Media Center lovers, and so on. Anyone that has their own HTPC loves them far more than a Tivo because they can do 10x more. A comparison to the iPhone (in my opinion) is ludicrous. They aren't even close to the same market. Even my grandma has a cellphone. You think she wants a Tivo when she can't even get the 12:00 to stop blinking on her VCR? Make no mistakes folks, the HTPC is here to stay and will only become a more popular component of the home system.

    So let's get this discussion headed where it should have been originally. One of Tivo's fall...and continual fall...due to the HTPC.