TiVo, R.I.P.

The folks who make TiVos have announced they are no longer making TiVos. There are articles all over the 'net (like this one) that try to explain wha' happened to their marketplace but it seems to me they were done in by two factors. One was that almost every cable company in the world decided to offer its subscribers a proprietary digital video recorder and to make it difficult, if not impossible, to record and watch programs on anything else.

Over the years, I got my television programming from a number of different cable or satellite sources and any time anything wasn't working properly, the suppliers' first response was to junk my TiVos and use their devices. Once, more than fifteen years ago, a service technician on the phone for one provider told me his company had just purchased the TiVo company and was shutting it down. Even people working for Trump never lied so baldly.

I always refused to abandon TiVo. I checked out a number of cable-provider-supplied DVRs and every single one was grossly inferior to whatever the TiVo people were offering at the time. On several occasions, I'd tell a service person I didn't want the DVR they offered and they'd ship me one anyway and add it to my monthly bill. It was a battle I won several times in the short run but couldn't help but lose eventually. The other thing that did TiVo in was the shift to streaming services that required no hardware except for a "Smart" TV.

I was a TiVo user from the start. I remember demonstrating my first one for friends who dropped by, none of whom had heard of such a thing…but immediately wanted one. Before that first TiVo, if you wanted to record a TV show in order to time-shift your viewing, you had to do it with Betamax or VHS cassettes that were never easy to program or even to keep up with what was where on which tape. TiVo was just easier in every way. But now that's over and the TiVo company — whatever's left of it and whoever owns it this week — will focus on streaming protocols and other projects, no longer leading an industry or even being particularly prominent in one.

I had to toss in the towel and go to streaming a few years ago but I still have about eight different TiVos in my house or garage. I tell myself I'm keeping them around for when I have time to plug them in again and dub off the programs I still have stored on their hard disks. But I think the truth is that I have trouble throwing away an old friend…especially one who served me so well.