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It’s the end of an era: TiVo no longer manufactures or sells the DVRs that made the company a household name. If you still have one, the company will continue to support it, but don’t go looking for one: TiVo as we know it is effectively over.
TiVo didn’t make a big deal about this discontinuation, however. As it happens, Luke Bouma of Cord Cutter News was the first to spot the development. Earlier this month, Bouma reported that TiVo Corporation had silently ended its DVR line, removing all references to the devices on its website. Following Bouma’s reporting, TiVo’s parent company, Xperi, confirmed the news.
In a statement to PCMag, an Xperi spokesperson said: “I can confirmed that as of [Oct.] 1, 2025, TiVo stopped selling physical DVR products, including hardware and accessories, both online and through agents…TiVo no longer manufacturers hardware, and our remaining inventory is now depleted, though we will continue to offer support for the products going forward.”
TiVo isn’t gone entirely. The brand now develops both TiVo OS, a smart TV operating system similar to Roku OS or Fire OS, as well as DTS AutoStage Video Service, an entertainment service developed for cars. But it is no longer a DVR manufacturer or seller, which might shock a time traveler from the early 2000s.
The TiVo effect
Tech comes and goes, but if you weren’t watching TV in the late ’90s and early 2000s, you might not know how monumental TiVo really was. The company launched its first DVRs in 1999 and introduced the market to features like one-touch simple recording, a hard drive to save multiple recordings at once, and, perhaps most notably, the ability to “pause” live TV and fast forward through commercials. The DVR offered viewers so much more than a simple VCR could, which only allowed for linear recording to single cassettes. TiVo could record live video from any input, including analog, cable, or satellite, which offered users flexibility in the content they recorded.
Before TiVo, if you missed the start of a show, you simply had to deal with it and try to jump in as best as you could—assuming you didn’t set a VCR to record it, of course. If you had a TiVo, however, you could simply rewind to the start of the program, and, when you reached a commercial break, skip ahead back to the show—until you caught up with the live broadcast.
TiVo disrupted the way consumers watched TV, and we’re likely seeing the ramifications of that today. The market adapted, and cable companies started offering their own DVRs with cloud-based recording as opposed to hard drive recording. Streaming services built on that momentum: Viewers were already getting used to watching shows whenever it suited them, so why not get ahead of the game, and offer all shows on-demand at any time? There’s no need to choose which programs to record: Everything is available at any time.
Like other early technology pioneers that fell behind with time, TiVo struggled through the streaming age it arguably helped create. The company hasn’t released a DVR since 2019, when it launched the TiVo Edge. That DVR had support for modern features, like 4K Dolby Vision HDR, Dolby Atmos sound, and access to major streaming apps, in addition to recording live TV. It then tried to break into the streaming device market with the TiVo Stream 4K, but the competition was too fierce to make an impact.
In a twist of irony, as TiVo discontinues its DVRs, streaming services are turning to ad-supported plans with increasing frequency. TiVo changed the game by letting us skip ads, and streaming originally omitted the ads entirely. But more and more customers are comfortable paying less to deal with commercials. We’ve come full circle in a way.
TiVo’s time might be at an end, but its impact lives on. What Skype did for video calls, TiVo did for TV. I’ll be thinking about that the next time I boot up something to watch on Netflix or Hulu.
Original Source: https://lifehacker.com/tech/tivo-discontinued-its-dvrs?utm_medium=RSS
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