I remember the first time I saw a TiVo box in the early 2000s. It looked like magic. You could pause live TV. Rewind a show you hadn’t been recording. Fast-forward through commercials. It felt like a superpower in the age of clunky VCRs. I knew right then the VCR was finished. I decided to buy it about three seconds after the salesman showed me how it worked.
Later came the TiVo–DirecTV combo unit, which was even better. Clean interface, smart recording, the little “boop-boop” sounds when you moved through menus. Then DirecTV realized they didn’t need TiVo. They built the same features into their own receivers. Cable companies copied it too. For a while, the DVR was king.
Now that king is dead. TiVo has stopped selling DVRs altogether, ending its hardware business after a twenty-five-year run. The idea lives on, though — in the cloud. Streaming services like YouTube TV, Hulu Live, and Fubo have taken TiVo’s concept online. You still record shows, but now they sit on a server instead of a hard drive in your living room.
TiVo’s website now points users in two directions: one, a sales pitch for smart TVs that use TiVo’s software inside, and two, its DTS AutoStage system — a video service for cars. The DVR, the box itself, is gone, though TiVo says it’ll still offer support for the devices that are still out there.
It’s part of a larger shift. Over-the-air TV is fading. Cable subscriptions keep dropping. Even satellite TV — once the great escape from cable — is losing altitude fast. Everything that used to sit in your house as a box or a dish or a tangle of cables is migrating to the cloud.
Everything passes away.
Over the years, I’ve watched a lot of once-essential gadgets go the same way. Flip phones. iPods. Palm Pilots. CD players. Camcorders. Those little red Netflix envelopes. Even the BlackBerry, once grafted into every executive’s hand, is a fossil.
I’ll miss TiVo — the mascot, the satisfying remote, the “Season Pass” that made sure you never missed an episode no matter if the network changed the schedule. I wish I’d held on to my first box for nostalgia’s sake. But if I did that with every extinct gadget, I’d need to open a museum. (If I had the money, that’s a thing I would do.)
Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is: a mental museum of devices that once felt like the future. And these days, it seems like the future is passing away faster and faster.