Robin newberry - Slashdot User

Comment Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score 4, Informative) 490

by Robin newberry on Friday February 26, 2010 @09:57AM (#31284350) Attached to: The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo

Actually, my Dad says that in the Days before TV they'd often set up a Reel-to-Reel tape recorder to record a radio show they'd otherwise miss, and then listen to it later. So "time shifting" is at least as old as reel-to-reel...

The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo 490

Posted by timothy on Friday February 26, 2010 @09:08AM from the better-to-be-verbed-than-knighted dept.

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."

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