TiVo began in 1997 as Teleworld, founded by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay to build a home network device before pivoting to a machine that digitized, compressed and stored television on a hard drive. After Ramsay promised a first-quarter release, engineers hit March 31, 1999, a blue moon, and code-named the first DVR Blue Moon. Designer Michael Cronin and the firm Pittard Sullivan created the smiling TV-set mascot. Because the drive kept a rolling 30-minute buffer, Trick Play let viewers pause, rewind and skip ahead in live TV, Season Pass recorded whole series, and TiVo Suggestions used thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings to record shows automatically.
TiVo logged every remote key press, and the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake moment at the February 1, 2004 Super Bowl became its most replayed ever, with a spike a company representative compared to an electrocardiogram. Users were opted in to data collection by default, and TiVo worked with Nielsen to sell commercial-viewing data. It tested pop-up ads during fast-forward in 2005 and added pre-roll ads in 2019. Broadcasters’ copy-once flags blocked transfers, and TiVo’s lockdown of its Linux-based boxes led Richard Stallman to coin Tivoization and the Free Software Foundation to bar the practice in GPLv3.
- Rival ReplayTV offered automatic commercial skipping and internet sharing, was sued by the TV industry, and its parent company went bankrupt.
- Comcast, Verizon and Dish built basic DVRs into the set-top boxes they rented to customers.
- TiVo ended U.K. unit sales in 2003 after BSkyB’s integrated decoder, returned through Virgin Media in 2010, and in late 2017 shut off its Australian service server-side.
- Bought by Rovi for $1.1 billion in 2016 and merged with Xperi in 2020, TiVo lost ground when the FCC dropped the CableCARD requirement in 2020; a 2015 redesign had turned the mascot into Blank Man.
- On October 1, 2025, TiVo was reported to have exited hardware entirely to license TiVo OS and collect fees from legacy boxes.
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