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Why TiVo's Founders Crashed and Burned With Qplay

Posted by timothy on from the have-you-ever-even-heard-of-this? dept.

Velcroman1 (1667895) writes "Michael Ramsay and Jim Barton created a revolution with TiVo, a device that challenged the notion that we had to watch TV shows when they aired. And they hoped to do it again with Qplay, a device that challenged the notion that short-form videos had to be consumed one at a time, like snacks instead of meals. Qplay streamed curated queues of short-form Internet video to your TV using a small, simple box controlled by an iPad app. So what went wrong? Unlike TiVo, the Qplay box was difficult to justify owning, and thevalue of the service itself is questionable. And as of last week, Qplay is closed."

9 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. What? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I love my Tivo, but - I also owned a VCR for the twenty years prior to my first Tivo. Time shifting has been around for 40+ years now.

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    1. Re:What? by geekoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think he meant:
      "...a device that challenged the notion that we had to watch commercials when they aired. " :)

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      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:What? by erice · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I love my Tivo, but - I also owned a VCR for the twenty years prior to my first Tivo. Time shifting has been around for 40+ years now.

      True, but limited device intelligence and limited tape capacity made time shifting an exception rather than the rule. Most VCR owners, even those who used the time shifting feature, still watched most of their TV programs at the time that they aired.

      With Tivo and other DVRs time-shifting becomes the norm and real-time an exception generally to be avoided.

    3. Re:What? by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      But Tivo was convenient time shifting. There are still no DVRs that match the ease of use of Tivo.

  2. It's hard by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's hard to buy something when you don't know it exists.

    Perhaps they should have tried advertising.

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  3. Re:separate hardware device by Wycliffe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Even as a free app it doesn't seem that useful to me. Youtube already has queue. It even has publicly browsable queues.
    If I really wanted to watch 2 hours of cute kittens then I'm sure there is probably a queue that I could hit play on and sit back
    and watch. It's fairly simple to queue up a bunch of videos and tell them to play in sequence without interruption.
    What exactly did Qplay do that ANYONE would fine useful? It seems like a solution looking for a problem.

  4. Re: Nothing went "wrong" by UpLock · · Score: 4, Informative

    16 year old company has had two profitable years--both due to patent settlements. It has half the subscribers it had ten years ago and four times the employees. It may be a great device but it has always been a lousy business for post-ipo investors.

  5. Re:Tivo is very long in the tooth... by Stuntmonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Tivo is a story of one missed opportunity after another. Great engineering that failed to iterate. They could have easily led the industry in streaming (from the net a la Netflix, or from home servers). They could have easily worked out interactive ad formats to layer on top of recorded shows. They could have easily gone the premium pay-per-view route (like iTunes/Apple TV/Amazon). It almost makes me angry to see so much wasted potential.

  6. Re:Could be worse - remember Victoria's Secrets by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Funny

    start another lingerie mail order company

    He started a children's clothing store

    I hope that at least one of you is wrong.

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    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.