With the TiVo Roamio line, TiVo hopes to marry the cable TV with digital streaming services. But is it enough to keep the company relevant?
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for TiVo. Even before I bought my first TiVo box back in 2003, I was a fan of the service and its functionality. Cable DVRs were only starting to roll out and the interface was a gigantic mess. Moreover, my TiVo had features such as home network support, box-to-box transfers and the ability to stream podcasts. TiVo was a product literally years ahead of its time.
The problem was that the shift to HDTV worked against the company. A box that once worked well with SD channels on an HDTV didn’t adapt to the HD world. Instead, using a TiVo required cumbersome adaptors and crucial trade-offs. At the same time, it just became easier to use the DVR built into the cable company’s set-top box. Even worse, television viewing increasingly shifted to include web programming something TiVo was late to address.
When I moved to New York City in 2011, I left my TiVo boxes behind. In spite of years of loyalty (I was a volunteer hardware and software beta tester for a number of years before becoming a tech journalist), TiVo simply hadn’t adapted to meet my needs as a TV viewer.
Read also:
TiVo Predicts Sustained Profits as Revenue, Earnings Jump (Wall Street Journal)
TiVo Posts $ 268.9 Million Profit Boosted by Settlements (Bloomberg)
TiVo Blows Past Earnings Expectations (Hollywood Reporter)
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