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The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo
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."
One could argue that if innovation moves far enough past the initial idea, it indeed qualifies as reinventing. While the rest of us pony up and recognize what an innovation Tivo was, you're of course free to continue to express your technical objections by shuffling your VCR tapes, having your VCR flash "12:00am", and looking up the upcoming TV schedule with your TVGuide and setting VCRPlus to record shows. The rest of us will use our DVRs and not have to worry about adjusting the tracking.
I should also note that the Tivo HD models all have a huge annoying downside that my cableco's native DVR doesn't, they can't upconvert existing SD chennels to an HD signal. Why is that important? Because every time I change channels between an SD channel and HD channel on a Tivo, my TV has to auto-adjust to the new signal (causing a serious delay and screen flickering). with my cableco's DVR, the TV thinks its always getting an HD signal, and so no such adjustments needed. This probably isn't as bad on some HDTV's, but on mine it makes channel surfing annoying as hell.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Screw the assholes who are modding my post as "troll".