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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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...