Say farewell to TiVo box, which revolutionized how we watch TV

Back in the days when the dotcom frenzy was nearing its peak and I was covering high-tech full time for this newspaper, scarcely a week passed without someone showing up in our newsroom offering a demonstration of a new consumer gizmo.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

Almost always these machines and the services they supported provoked yawns. As the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, there was nothing new under the sun. Until the day a team from a company called ReplayTV wheeled in a television set wired to a box with a digital hard drive inside. They hooked up this digital video recorder to a cable jack and showed how we could use it to record, pause, rewind and fast-forward live TV.

As I've often related since then, that was the only time I ever walked away from one of those demos thinking, “That will change my life, and I must have it.” A Replay executive predicted, “Five years from now, all TV will be watched from a hard disk.” Watching the device in action, that seemed right.

The intervening years can be thought of as the TiVo era, named for the surviving device of a two-company technology battle with ReplayTV. “TiVoing,” meaning to record a show for later viewing, even became one of those generic gerunds, like “Xeroxing” or “Googling.”

But on Oct. 1, TiVo, now owned by the technology holding company Xperi, ended sales of its physical video devices. They're no longer being manufactured and its own supply is “depleted,” the company says, though it says it will continue to serve existing owners. TiVo is now TiVo OS, an operating system marketed to makers of smart TVs.

In other words, the era of the TiVo set-top box is over. Its history should teach us a few things: The ineluctability of technological change in the consumer industry. The difficulty of riding out technological revolutions. The trend toward ever-improving video images transmitted via broadband.

Looking back, one can see that digital video recorders were a transitional technology in the march from over-the-air broadcasting to streaming, which is wiping out the usage of DVRs. But they were an essential step in the ultimate divorce of viewing habits from broadcast TV’s no-choice time-and-place regimentation.