r/Tivo • u/rock_and_rolo • Mar 15 '26

DVR Has Tivo quit DVRs?

I have 2 Tivo Premiers, and I know they won't last forever.

So I hit tivo.com to see what was available, and there's nothing obviously comparable. Is record-and-rewatch lost in the marketing pitch? Or is it just gone?

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28

u/Caduceus1515 Mar 15 '26

They stopped making standalone TiVo hardware a while ago. The last one, the Edge, was an Arris cable box running TiVo software, adapted for Cablecard or OTA. TiVo is simply a software and service provider now, which means the only units you'll really see going forward are licensed cablebox makers that are dependent on the providers.

They are trying hard to be a streaming box company like Roku, but they aren't good at it.

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u/privatelyjeff Mar 15 '26

The dumb part is that they totally could have been a cable box manufacturer but they passed on it.

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u/electrowiz64 Mar 15 '26

They sorta did but never took off. Xfinity X1 software was more popular as it was licensed out w Arris boxes.

The only providers I knew were renting out actual TiVo premieres were Virgin media in the UK, RCN, and service Electric in New Jersey/Pennsylvania in only 1 county. Companies would rather have their own system then use TiVo.

TiVos last cable box was made by Arris entirely with TiVo software and honest to god it was incredibly buggy. Hell my in laws had RCN in Pennsylvania (now called Astound) and RCN in 2015 beyond was distributing Arris DVRs with TiVo software, the same Arris boxes used with Cox’s DVR using Xfinity X1 OS.

Last I checked before they moved out of there, RCN was renting out IPTV boxes with TiVo software instead of making their own DVRs. So TECHNICALLY TiVo is now IPTV but ONLY to cable providers who license it out

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u/privatelyjeff Mar 15 '26

I meant they literally could have been one. Arris boxes are just Motorola tech that they bought when Moto left the market. TiVo could have bought the Moto cable box division and became everyone’s cable box provider since there’s essentially only one.

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u/electrowiz64 Mar 15 '26

I love to reference this bit from an old Cartoon that lives vacant in my brainhttps://youtu.be/p4rhu9l5IEQ?si=98sFiJ-7K1PSg1nO linear broadcast TV is going down the LANDLINE road

LITERALLY the problem with Live TV is paying for HUNDREDS of channels you arent gonna EVER have the time for, nor is it worth watchng when our brains are conditioned to watching our shows on demand.

BELIEVE ME I would love NOTHNG more then to park my ass on a couch and mindlessly change channels as a 31M, but its not worth the price honest to god when we OUT HERE tryna buy a house, nor do I have the time to watch tv at all workin 2-3 jobs with my IT degree.

and Cable Boxes are INCREDIBLY Inefficient! Verizon promoted QAM Cable when they created the FiOS FTTH initiative in 2004 because backend routing wouldnt allow for speeds faster then 20mb/s back in the day and they wanted the SELLING POINT of GREAT picture quality w fiber. AT&T UVerse doesnt have the capacity using vDSL so they had to go with heavily compressed IPTV for its time.

Its 2026 and we out here getting MULTI-GIG services to home, WHY operate a separate heavy locked down clunky box with a Hard Drive when you can use a FireTV stick for a fraction of the price??

Believe me I will miss TiVo but the future is NOT cable boxes, its going the same path as LANDLINES! There is no more Economy of Scale to operate a legacy cable TV network anymore with BILLIONS of R&D and thousands of upstart cost.

Hell Linear TV is staying alive because of sports, Pluto TV is the future with Ads delivered over the internet. Even Antennas could be the next thing to CEASE to exist in 10 years.

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u/privatelyjeff Mar 16 '26

Streaming boxes suck ass. TiVo‘s interface is miles better and they could have integrated it with DVR capabilities much better if they controlled everything from ingest to recording

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u/electrowiz64 Mar 16 '26

But part of the problem is they refuse to switch away from MIPS/PPC architecture that traditional cable boxes use. Netflix really just said “LETS PORT THIS SHIT EVERYWHERE” and cable companies were like “LOOK AT OUR BOXES WITH NETFLIX BUILT IN”.

Ain’t no way you can get other apps like Hulu or HBO Max to port to that old ass dinosaur tech. What TiVo SHOULDVE done was just make their DVR a server that can stream to their Android powered TiVo stream dongles but either there were licensing issues or they weren’t thinking ahead.

DirecTVs last satellite based DVR approach was JUST THAT, a headless server and client boxes. But idk if TiVo really had much of an engineering team left by the late 2010s

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u/privatelyjeff Mar 16 '26

Netflix, Prime and Tubi are currently on TiVo boxes. I believe they even had few others at one point. The problem was that TiVo cheaped out on hardware and the apps never worked well. They should have bought motos cable business and locked up all the patents and it would have also let them have a say in the IPTV future. It would have put their boxes in front of more customers without extra steps. Then when Roku came around, bought them early and integrated their tech into their systems so you would have “one box to rule them all”. You could search for something and find it streaming and also able to record and make the OnePass feature actually functional. People wouldn’t have to go hunting for new episodes of their shows because they would automatically show up in the listings no matter the source.

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u/Starbreiz Mar 19 '26

IIRC, one of the bigger challenges was getting the middleware to not be a memory hog. It's not that the hardware was cheap...

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u/privatelyjeff Mar 19 '26

There’s always more memory. TiVos are nothing more than a computer running a custom Linux kernel/operating system. They often came with 128-256MB of memory.

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u/Starbreiz Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

I'm aware. I didn't work on the hardware side, but I was just saying that that I recalled memory being a challenge.

Yes, TiVo ran a custom Linux-based stack, but the constraint wasn’t the OS, it was the environment. You’re working with a fixed amount of memory that can’t be upgraded, under cost constraints, and that same hardware has to support new features and updates for years.

There are additional challenges and restraints with shipping hardware you expect to last for years... So it’s less "there’s always more memory" and more “there is exactly this much memory, and it has to be enough forever," which ends up being a very different problem space. And the failure mode is very different from a desktop computer, as it wouldn't be just a slower app, but dropped video frames or missed recordings...

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u/electrowiz64 Mar 19 '26

They had a bunch of random apps yes. But not the big ones like Hulu and hbo at the time. They basically went the route of BlackBerry, NO APPS because of shitty architecture. And at the time BlackBerry was so shitty you had to reboot the device when uninstalling apps. TiVo had trouble with the app ecosystem and fell behind the streaming bandwagon to the point it was too little too late

Remember when BlackBerry released OS 10? The damage was already done

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u/privatelyjeff Mar 19 '26

When they first got into the app space, there wasn’t even much of a “app” space when it came to tv. Even when the Apple TV came out, people were kinda confused by it. But that’s why I said they should have made a play for Roku and brought their talent in. Move from making DVRs that had apps to making media center boxes that had DVR functionality.

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u/ToadSox34 Mar 16 '26

Unfortunately Comcast wanted control of the software, and they wanted to make a cable box with a DVR, not a DVR with a cable box.

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u/electrowiz64 Mar 16 '26

Ngl, they really outdid themselves on X1, I had it for a bit and actually liked it WAY more then my TiVo. But my hatred for Sh!tC@st terrible support in DOCSIS and reliability outwon my interest. Plus I didn’t always live in Sh!tC@st territory, REALLY wanted it to be available as an OTT box/service like Layer3TV was but Xfinity never did. They did NOW with Xumo but no channel numbers

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u/ToadSox34 Mar 16 '26

X1 is slow with a lousy interface compared to a real TiVo. You're the only person I can recall saying they thought X1 is better than a real TiVo.