TiVo needed the people it was robbing

TiVo makes the best digital video recorder anyone has built and is losing to boxes that are worse in every respect. The reason has nothing to do with either product.

Buying a TiVo means researching it, purchasing hardware outright, taking out a separate subscription, obtaining a card from your cable company that they would rather not give you, fitting it, and hoping the installation works. Getting the cable operator’s recorder means saying yes on a phone call you were already having, after which a box arrives and ten dollars appears on a bill you already pay every month.

The operator’s box has a confusing remote, a guide that responds slowly, and search that barely functions. It is winning comfortably, because the effort required to get it is nearly zero and the effort required to get the good one is considerable.

That much is an ordinary distribution story. What makes this one worse is that TiVo’s route to market runs through companies with a reason to keep it out.

The feature people loved most was skipping advertisements. Not skipping them awkwardly, skipping them completely and without thinking about it, to the point where a generation stopped knowing what was being advertised. That is the thing that made the product beloved, and it is a direct attack on the revenue of the industry TiVo needed as a partner.

You cannot build a business whose central feature destroys the income of your only viable distributor. Every negotiation starts with the other side understanding that a success for you is a loss for them, and they control the card, the guide data, the billing relationship, and the phone call where the decision gets made.

So the operators built their own, deliberately without the good skip function, and bundled it into the subscription where it costs the customer no decision at all.

My expectation is that TiVo persists for years as an admired product with a small, loyal, shrinking base, and eventually earns more from litigating its patents than from selling anything. That is the usual ending for a company that solved the problem correctly while depending on someone who preferred it unsolved.

Time-shifting has won completely and TiVo will get nearly nothing for it. Being first and being right are worth surprisingly little when someone else owns the route to the living room.