Tivo Exiting Legacy Dvr Business
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TiVo is exiting the legacy DVR business, marking the end of an era for a pioneering product that revolutionized TV recording, with commenters reflecting on its impact and the current state of media consumption.
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They have! https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
The market for DVRs has shifted a lot and while TiVo's system was wonderful, it's hard to get people to pay you a monthly fee for a service that's included for free with your cable package. Companies are often offering networked DVR service with unlimited storage - they record it in their data center and you just stream it later.
TiVo really needed to pivot and simply didn't. TiVo should have become another Roku, but they were probably worried about cannibalizing their DVR revenue. They had the operating system and hardware to beat Roku to the market - or even become the primary alternative to Roku for years after Roku had launched. Roku launched in 2008 and TiVo could have followed. FireTV and AndroidTV launched in 2014 so there was a huge window in there for TiVo (and Chromecast was 2013 so that doesn't change things much).
TiVo was focused on getting individuals to pay them $X per month for service. Roku figured out that it would be a lot easier to get all the streaming companies to give them a cut rather than getting it from the end users as well as being a platform to serve ads to end users.
If TiVo had looked at Roku and said "we can do that even better," they would have had a very different future. TiVo launched a Roku competitor in 2020 based on AndroidTV, but that was way too little and way too late. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, TiVo had an absolutely amazing OS. They needed to release a Roku competitor stripped of the DVR bit for the cord-cutting streamers. They needed to pivot their business model toward the service-revenue-cut and ad-revenue model that Roku went after. They needed to see that cable and satellite was a dead-end as those companies would try to cut them out of the loop with their internal DVR products (and even if TiVo were better, most customers wouldn't want to pay extra for it).
TiVo should have pivoted 15 years ago and become one of a couple dominant streaming box players. Instead, Amazon and Google followed Roku into the market even though TiVo had 6 years to enter that market and had a polished OS and great reputation at the time. TiVo feels a bit like Nokia. Nokia ignored smartphones long enough that they kinda faded away - and then their effort was too little, too late.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nintendo
What does this actually mean? An AI-authored press release? A customer support bot message?
User hostile will always be more profitable.
It used to be impossible to be this user hostile. You could not build a VCR that was unable to record the Superbowl.
Tech fixed only that.
Enshittification is just what capitalism means
Preventing capitalism from doing exactly what it wants to do requires regulation and enforcing competition. Competition does not happen naturally. Competition is expensive and low profit and kills businesses, so they try to avoid it.
Gas stations next door to each other don't do price wars anymore, because it demonstrably did not improve profits. Sure, you could lower your price slightly and maybe get a few more customers than you do now, but they will just lower their prices and at the end of the day you both end up making less money.
So you just don't compete. Instead of lowering your price, you match their price.
You can't even make a backup of the shows and movies you "buy", which just means "license", today.
I still use Internet based services, for example I might find a new band because someone on Instagram posted about them. Or maybe I listen to an album on streaming before deciding if I'm buying it. Oh and some live music venues have Youtube live streaming (e.g. Smalls jazz club). With movies, of course I might watch a movie trailer or a review on YouTube.
Speaking of movies, the situation is different because unlike music, I can't actually find most of my favourites on streaming services. However more often than not, you can rent them online, so I might rent (but never buy!) a movie through Apple, YouTube etc., then if I like it and think I want to watch it again, I will buy a Blu-ray. But I kinda gave up on pure streaming services such as Netflix etc. since their catalogue is so shallow.
This obviously doesn't work for everyone, if your way of listening to music is just "Hey Alexa play a smooth jazz playlist while I cook" then of course streaming is the right thing for you. Same if you just like to watch movies casually and you're not a film buff, in that case Netflix & co. are OK.
Im seeing prices now around $10/TB for storage. Not fast, sure, but with 8 x 16TB disks, you get 128TB storage, and with RAID6 96TB. And thats only $1300
And if you architect the storage server right, you can use NFS on that and do all your exports to various docker containers and VMs. Proxmox makes setting this up pretty painless.
And if you have money to burn and want screaming fast, go with some of the NVME drives and combined cards. Then you can do this near-solid state and also reduce your form factor a LOT.
We're in the middle of basically every major "service company" enshittifying or already done so. Services are getting worse, costs are going up, and they're slow-boiling everyone to extract as much money from both customers and businesses. So, running this stuff yourself is the only way to retain your freedom and control.
Personally I _never_ wanted to watch same movie twice, but I can understand some would. I guess most are still accessible in some archive somewhere for a small fee. I'd guess that fee is far less than you hoarding it for 4 decades.
I felt like they had consumer awareness at one point. Maybe if they went with there own premium streaming service, as oppose to only trying ad-based streaming services (like Pluto) OR continuing to try to make money charging people monthly for a subscription to use a device they first have to purchase.**
Instead they kept the old business model and went to more of a business-to-business service oriented offerings. Selling metadata, APIs, TV Guides, Car infotainment, all oddities IMO as most IPTV providers like to use turn key solutions.
I actually use the Tivo Stream 4K as my smart device. Works great, gives me 4K, can download Android TV apps, and is cheap $35.
Not a fan of ad-based TV (which is the Tivo+ thing, like Pluto, etc...), but I use it mostly for YouTube, Plex, etc.
--
*: My Plex server uses my HDHomerun for live tv; TiVo could have been both if it was more open. A TiVo competitor to Plex's Pass + Live TV service could of been there subscription revenue, and a TiVo competitor to HDHomeRun's devices could of replaced their DVR revenue. They could take the Tivo Edge, open it way up (as the HDHomeRun takes cable and give you actual m3u8's; this lets you decide where you view or record TV, and makes the device actually useful for commercial deployments as well (offices, restaurants, dorms, hotels, etc...). Pretty much: add features similar to Plex (i.e. combining my OTA/Cable recordings with my local media) + Plex's Live TV (Tivo already has the richest data and a sleeker guide) and combine the Tivo Edge CableCard and OTA in one device. This would appeal to many users, bring the hardware price down as it's one model, and provide them with both revenue streams like they are used to.
If you don't own the content, you get squeezed. Hulu, Spotify all of these guys get nickle-dimed into oblivion.
Netflix understood this deeply creating one of the biggest, successful pivots in startup-dom
It made sense back when it was launched but is basically redundant with Disney+ at this point. Still profitable though
There's also Jellyfin if you're really into the whole Plex thing.
They just stream straight from the file share. No transcoding nonsense or server necessary.
In rare cases, you may decide that you wish to allow very specific access from the local network without authentication. You might do this if using a third-party Plex app, which doesn’t support authentication, for instance (though all modern official and third-party apps should already support authentication).
To make an exception, look in your Plex Media Server’s advanced network settings, under Settings > Server > Network > List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth.
Here, you can specify LAN addresses as either a specific IP or a IP/netmask (to specify a range). Separate multiple values by a comma and be sure not to include any whitespace (e.g. spaces).
I believe that the regular "external" connection requires a STUN server, so it will fail without Internet.
Jellyfin is free, but I prefer Emby and bought the lifetime license on sale.
> if they went with there [should be “their”] own premium streaming service
> Plex's Pass + Live TV service could of [should be “could have”] been there [should be “their”] subscription revenue
> a TiVo competitor to HDHomeRun's devices could of [should be “could have”] replaced their DVR revenue
Honestly, the "could of" is more of a "sometimes I write how I sound" thing, but anything else, is more of a middle of the night brain mush.
I actually re-wrote that bottom part at least twice because I had a lot to say, but didn't know how to say it concisely. As I was writing it, I kept having less and less confidence that any readers would have prior knowledge about I was writing about (ex: Plex, HDHomeRun, TiVo Edge), so I kept defining or explaining things in parenthesis and re-ordering the sentences; so at one point I just had to say, good enough, click reply
I hate lengthy/wordy comments that coulda' () been just a couple of sentences, but I also love to explain things in a way that a wide range of people can comprehend, so it's a battle at times. (this reply is a good example...reply)
I switched to AT&T Fiber but was keeping my Spectrum TV service just for my TiVo. When I called to turn off just Internet with Spectrum they terminated both. When I called to get them to turn my cable service back on they refused to reactivate my Cable Card that the TiVo uses. Since they were no longer required to support them, no new activations were allowed. I’m sure that played a huge part in this. Other providers like satellite or fiber TV had no obligation either.
Being able to pay $2.50 / month for a cable card and then use my TiVo with multiple minis around my house rather than paying per room to the cable company was great for years.
But YouTubeTV is excellent too. The only thing I miss is the ability to save recordings for as long as I want or record anything I want. There were some I kept for years and YT only lets you keep them for a few months.
cf yt=dlp[0]
[0] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
https://getchannels.com/
Imagine my shock that these new broadcasts are DRMed. HDHomerun can't decode them. I don't blame them, I'm absolutely incensed that OTA broadcasts have been allowed to start using DRM.
We're back to the 1970's and early 80's when some OTA channels were allowed to charge subscriptions.
The difference this time is that the new decoders send information /back/ to the TV station, so you can be further tallied, tabulated, profiled, and collated.
Which is the precise reason I switched to OTA. What I watch is my business, not theirs.
Ironically never once actually used a TiVo but still RIP was a cool idea and I got free drives out of it.
TiVo had a few experimental features and NBC helped test them. You could press the TiVo button to record the show that was being advertised by a commercial for Friends, if the TiVo logo prompted you.
Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select ;-)
Also can't forget the ,#401 dialing prefix to enable the device to call home over the Internet using a USB Ethernet adapter instead of the phone in the early days.
TiVo's whole approach to commercials in recordings was largely informed by ReplayTV though. ReplayTV took a lot of heat and lawsuits for their automatic commercial skip functionality, which is why TiVo never implemented it and buried 30 second skip behind the code.
But the commercial skipping used a set of a dozen filters for things like black screens, volume changes, logos in the corner, and bayesian analysis to nail every single commercial transition. It was flawless.
("Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware." [0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Stallman coined the term "Tivozation". The word was literally created to describe how TiVo acted. Without TiVo doing what TiVo did, and Stallman calling it out, the word would not exist.
Stallman then went on to use the neologism to promote the need for a GPLv3 to combat such practises.
Bradley Kuhn -- the director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and writer of 2/3 of those links you're linking to -- has a public dispute with Stallman, disagrees about the need for GPLv3, and disagrees about Stallman's characterisation of TiVo's behaviour. But it's disingenuous to claim Stallman's own coinage doesn't mean what he intended it to mean.
Edit to add: Stallman is quite correct to call out TiVo's behaviour, even if it's "just" the proprietary software that intentionally breaks itself when you exercise your software freedoms. TiVo's intent is to smack you good and hard if you dare exercise your GPL freedoms even a little bit. They benefitted from GPL'd software that got them to market faster, but you can't benefit by e.g. installing a better kernel, they intentionally brick the functional system. That's not acceptable.
If you use GPL software, it comes with rights: You can request and inspect the source code. It also comes with obligations: You must share any changes you make so that all downstream users know what they'll get.
TiVo may not have violated GPLv2, they certainly violated its spirit with a workaround. And thus GPLv3 was born, indeed.
TiVo could have done what they wanted using BSD, but they opted for Linux, took the benefits, didn't give anything.
Of course, one can find this acceptable, Linus Torvalds seem to think it is acceptable.
I think they could have been a much better Roku.
No idea if TiVo ever had access to the capital to pull this off. Certainly you’d need to eat thin or negative margins on billions in hardware.
I had a much better experience integrating a PC with a couple of PCIe Hauppauge tuners running Windows Media Center with a couple of Xbox 360s as streaming devices.
Except you can[0], and I have for decades.
[0] https://github.com/lart2150/kmttg
Nope. It was nice while it lasted, but just look where it ended up.
For OTA recording, I've used Windows Media Center but it went out of support, and more recently the HDHomerun DVR, which both worked decently.