TiVo: Press pause

TV is live. Like blink and you'll miss it, live. Go to the bathroom and you'll miss it, live. But here comes a box that gives you the greatest power of all. To pause live TV, to rewind it, to fast forward it, to record it and watch it some other time entirely. This box is very expensive, but it might just change your life. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. Today, we are talking about the best remote you've ever seen in your life. It's TiVo. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into... With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. Go to shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. All right, we're back. Let's talk TiVo. Neilai Patel is here. Hi, Neilai. Hey. Emily Nussbaum, welcome. Thank you for coming to do this with us. Hello. Thank you for having me. You, I believe the two of you, I sincerely believe this, are like America's greatest scholars and fans of TiVo over time. And I have a mountain of evidence to prove this. It's fair to say both of you were early and late to TiVo. Yeah. Is that fair? Loyal to this day. Still long after. No, yeah, I got TiVo as soon as I heard of it, I think. I mean, I don't remember my exact entrance ramp, but the minute I heard there was something better than my horrible VCR, and I don't think I was really—it wasn't like I was using it for my job. I wasn't really writing about television that much when it came out. But I immediately knew I had to have this because I hated the VCR so much. This was one of those cases where I got something, and it actually genuinely felt like a miracle, like a life-changing device. Was it just the recording? Part of it was the fact that I am a flaky person. And when I came to recording things on my VCR, first of all, you had to have this pile of bricks, sky high bricks that you had to label and you had to figure out how far they had gone. And people don't remember this, but it was incredibly difficult to record on a VCR. But it tempted you because it said that it could record in advance. And so I would tell it, you know, I want to record Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something on Thursday at 8 o'clock. and then you had to move these little dials. So TiVo, I remember pulling it up and just telling it, I want to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the fact that it was going to remember that and record it for me every week. I realize this doesn't seem like the greatest technological thing in the history of time and space, but for me it was huge. And then this thing happened right away, which is that the TiVo decided that because I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was evidence of what else I liked, which it decided was Kung Fu. Yeah. Oh, sure. An early broken TikTok algorithm. Yes. Okay. What about you? How'd you come to Tiva? I mean, I was a gadget blogger in the mid to late 2000s. There weren't smartphones. Right. You know? You got to write about something. The Tiva was the gadget. It was a Linux computer that threatened to revolutionize the TV industry. It was in a constant love-hate relationship with Hollywood. There were copyright lawsuits. There were patent lawsuits. There were failed partnerships. I mean, it was like everything you could want as a tech blogger. There was an ideological battle over the soul of Linux that was contained in TiVo. There was. We're going to get to that. Yeah. There was almost no product that we could write about at Engadget in the mid to late 2000s that just hit all of the notes. The thing about it was that no one had one, but everyone had ideas about it. Yes. Everyone knew what they wanted it to be or what TiVo was doing and how that reflected all of their preconceived notions about gadgets in the living room. And then no one bought the product. Like Emily bought the product. See, I did not know this. See, I had a very, very different experience of this. I wasn't really following this. As either a business or a tech story, I just thought it's so obvious that this is a necessary part of people's households that everybody will get it immediately. And then I stuck to that opinion until the day that it went under. I believe that people who found it and ran Tevo felt the same way. They just never proved the case. And by the way, I'm an early adopter in general on a lot of technologies, but I'm usually incredibly picky and frustrated by what they do and their bad side effects. So this is the one where when you guys asked me to do this, I was like, I was flooded with positive memories, like a crazy nostalgic thing for a utopic period. when, especially during the first few years, to the point that I actually did, there was a television show, I think a Canadian television show, did a thing on the beginnings of TiVo and they asked me to appear on it. And so somewhere out there, there's a clip of me sounding like a cult member. You are the world's first TiVo influencer. There's your patent litigation. You should be out there. That's in keeping with TiVo, the only thing to do if you have a tiny amount of success is get the patent and sue everyone. Sue the hell out of everybody for it. All right, we're going to get to that. Well, let's just start the story all the way back at the beginning. So we're in the mid-90s, and the story starts with these two guys, Mike Ramsey and Jim Barton, who worked at Silicon Graphics. This is already a very 1990s story because Silicon Graphics exists. And basically, Mike at Silicon Graphics had been selling these super expensive workstations to Hollywood, basically, like really expensive ways to use this stuff to make movies. and Jim was part of a team supporting a thing called the Orlando Project at Time Warner Cable. Does this ring a bell to you in particular, Nilay Patel? No, this is at least slightly before my time. Yeah, okay. So this is like, yeah, this is college Nilay. Yeah. Maybe. The Orlando Project was when Time Warner Cable tried to do an interactive TV thing for one community in Florida. They were basically like, we think- Was it Orlando? It was in fact Orlando. Okay, just checking. The cable company being like, it's going to be Somerset, Florida, but we're calling it the Orlando Pro. Totally in character. 100%. What was interactive? So it was this big idea. This was the early internet, and it was peak cable. And so they're like, okay, we're going to make it so that you can shop and send email and do all of the internet stuff you want to do. But you don't have to have a computer. You're going to do it on your television. And this is, Neil, as I think you can vouch for, a dream many people have had many times over the years. And it never works. So this one died also. The Orlando Project is like a deep and weird rabbit hole that I encourage everybody to go down. Although a good band name. It is a good band name. Like a ska band is kind of what I imagine when I think of the Orlando Project. But anyway, so Mike and Jim have this idea that actually what they should do is leave Silicon Graphics and go build a thing that is basically what we would call a home media server. They had this idea that like, okay, in the future, there's going to be lots of different digital signals coming into your house. And what we need is a way to like route it to all of your different devices. because someday you're going to want to watch TV on lots of different things. We need a way to move it all around. Pitch this around. Absolutely no one wanted this. This is like just a completely dead idea. But then Jim Barton said this about one of the meetings they were having. He said, somebody told us, I don't even remember who, but they said what I'd really like to be able to do is pause the TV and go to the bathroom. And I realized I know how to do that. And thus began all of this. Wait, pause the TV or go to the bathroom? Both. This is a genuinely genius insight. This is a really true thing that, again, people don't remember. And I sound like an old person. It's like, back in the old days, you waited for the commercial to come and then somebody would literally scream from the living room, it's on again. And you would have to run back. And that, I mean, there were so many different side effects of this as far as the nature of television, what television was. The idea that that would be the insight that would lead to this is so funny to me, though, because it's not, you know, he wasn't about like, you know, we should be able to store lots of things on it or get all of the episodes, but just you should be able to pause it during the commercials, which are the central aspect of TV. Did he also say you should be able to forward past the commercials? That comes later. Okay. But yeah, I think you're right. That one insight is I think if you boil TiVo all the way down, it is that thing. And I remember how big a deal it was. I never had TiVo. My family was on like- No one did, David. We're the only two customers right here. What am I, chocolate? Like I've used it all the time. But we were on like rabbit ears broadcast, like way longer than was appropriate for people to be. But I remember when I could pause sports and how like life-changing that felt. That was just like, oh, something is happening. I don't have to like sprint to the refrigerator. I can just pause the television. And it really is, it's like a perfect little solution to a life problem in a way that is just utterly delightful. So I just want to say a couple of things. One, first remote, the biggest button was the pause button. Oh, really? They knew what they were selling, and it was just a huge yellow button. We have a Series 2 remote, and they made it smaller on this remote, but the first one, it was like pause. But it's still, even here, it's a big yellow button right in the middle. Just do pause. That's the thing you're going to do. The other thing I want to say, to Emily's point, like one of our big ideas at The Verge is that the way you distribute media changes the media itself in very important ways. This is just some Marshall McLuhan stuff. And the idea that you could pause it, you can just see what happened after that. Yeah. And the thing is, this is also, I mean, you know, whereas the thing I always say is I always say this thing about how television is a medium and the thing that makes it distinct is it's simultaneously an art form, an economic structure, and a technology. And every time one of those things changes, the others change. So the art form is dependent on the distribution system and the economy. And, yes, the invention of these tools that could let you pause and rewind changed the nature of television, what television could do. And also I think how people saw television because I think the fact that it was unpausable, that it was live, that it would be extruded into your living room and then disappear forever. It was ephemeral. Yeah. It was ephemeral. And if you wanted to revisit it with somebody, you had to memorize it. I mean, we can talk about this, but, you know, things like Lost, which is a puzzle show that people were examining for Easter eggs, but also things like The Wire, which was a show that was dense with information in a way TV historically hadn't been. I think we're both very affected by the fact that they knew that their viewers could revisit them on their devices and then discuss them online because the two things are connected. It's so funny because you used it for sports and I'm sure it was huge for sports, but I did not watch sports. Yeah. So I just went and looked and it was that insight of back and forward came up very quickly. You get the sense they had this insight that they were like, oh, we can pause the TV. And then like, oh, my God, we are the masters of the universe. We can we can manipulate this thing however we want. So these two guys go off and start this company. They originally call it Teleworld. And I think a very fun question is, would we talk about Teleworld the way we talk about TiVo? And I think the answer is absolutely not. Like TiVo became a verb in the way that I'm going to Teleworld that. So wait, where is TiVo the name come from? So I've seen and read a bunch of theories about where this name came from. And I think it is like that conned mythology. But what it seems to me is they set out to build the next TV. So they wanted to have TV in there. And then the thing that I think has been applied later is they took IO for like input, output on a computer, shoved them together and made TiVo. Didn't they hire some famous design company? I always just assumed that they hired like Frog or Idea. They hired IDEO, in fact. And IDEO did all the user interface design and the sounds and the remote. And I'm guessing they were like, make it a cute TiVo guy. And we'll call it like that's what you hire a company like that to do. Yes. And they had this very clear sense. It seems like very early on that they wanted this thing to be like personable and fun and like delightful in a way that other things weren't. But they also had this thing where they were like, their big idea was essentially to just start with a hard drive, which is very funny. Because what you're talking about with VCRs and VHS is that was just messy technology. And they were like, okay, well, the hard drives are coming along. They work better. They're faster. They're simpler. They're easier. We're just going to take a hard drive. And what we're going to do is we're going to put a bunch of space for you to store stuff. And then we're going to put a bunch of space that just buffers, that it can just sort of perpetually be recording onto and off of. And that is like a thing that works. And this is like high-end equipment could do this already. And like if you were making one of these, you know, Hollywood workstations, that existed. But nobody just had a hard drive in their living room, even though a hard drive was way better and more reliable than anything else. So they go to visit, you know, a bunch of folks trying to get investors. And one of the people they go to is Paul Allen, who is the co-founder of Microsoft. And I only bring this up because I found this amazing story. This is from Howard Look, who was an early executive. He says, we flew up to Seattle to demo the product for Allen at his Mercer Island home. While we talked, koi fish were splashing in a pond. He kept pulling out bags of potato chips. He asked a lot of good questions. And then he asked, would you like to see my home media environment? He took us to an underground bunker with a 200-seat movie theater, and he had robotic arms programmed to put VHS tapes into VCRs. Oh, my God. That's very good. That's an amazing story. Like if ever someone were perfectly set up to love TiVo. Also, that completely gets at the problem that we're trying to solve. That's so funny. Robotic arms. There was another company that went to see Paul Allen that same day. called Replay TV, which was doing roughly the same thing at roughly the same time, and was founded by a guy named Anthony Wood, who wound up being the founder and CEO of Roku, which is just like a crazy other alternate universe story. So all of this is starting to happen. They get the money, they're like starting to build this thing, people are excited about it. They wind up picking the name TiVo over names like Bongo and Lasso. Like you can tell there's like a vibe they're going for here. My theory with TiVo is like they knew TV and then just like did some stuff to put an O at the end because they thought that sounded nice. They wanted to be cute. And then they made some other stuff up after that. Yeah. The biggest and I think in many ways most consequential decision they made was whether to run Windows on this thing. And at that time, like Windows ran the world. Everything ran Windows. So the assumption was like it would be on Windows. But the way they framed it was they needed a box that never crashed. They like knew this was the thing that if you set it up to record and it didn't disaster, right? This is like making this thing super reliable is really important. And I found an interview where he was like, well, and Windows crashed a lot. So they basically, so they went out and rather than just shipping Windows on it and running whatever Bill Gates wanted them to run in the living room, they went and built an entirely new version of Linux just to run on their boxes. You alluded to this earlier, but it caused like a mini kerfuffle in the Linux world because TiVo then didn't give its version of Linux back to the Linux. It had a name. This was a name. People would derisively refer to TiVo-ization. TiVo-ization. That's right. This is so in the weeds. No one cares about this anymore. No, I'm actually kind of – I'm curious. This is what we're here for. Why was it – We are so past this. What does it mean to say that something – is it a corrupting or mainstreaming or mass – I think at that time it meant like all of it, you know? Like Satan, like whatever that word needed to mean, it meant that thing on the Slashdot forums Specifically Linux was new at that time Right It was the beginning of open source software the beginning of these licenses where if you made a change you would have to contribute that change back for free to the community. Right. There were many new kinds of licenses were burgeoning at the time. All of this was in response to Microsoft. And so what TiVo did was they took the core Linux operating system, and they said, fine, we'll give you back all of our changes to the core operating system. But TiVo, the application which runs on top, That belongs to us. So we're going to use Linux as the core of this product. But all of the innovation we will keep under a proprietary standard copyright license. So it was a philosophical opposition to the pure and idealistic notion that was behind open source and Linux. Because I wondered whether it was also attaching it to TV, which was seen as a – No, it was just that TiVo was the first to take an open source product of kind of Linux's magnitude. And remember, like Linux was young-ish as a project. Linus Torvalds, younger. In my mind, he's always sort of been Gandalf, but like he was younger at the time. This was a long time ago. And the idea that you would build a mass market commercial project that was sold in Best Buy and not contribute meaningfully back to Linux was a huge like breach of ethics or morals or whatever that community felt. And they called it Tevoization. And there were massive questions about whether you would amend the Linux license itself to either prohibit or, in some cases, people would argue, accelerate TiVoization because you want more things to run Linux. And now everything is TiVoized. Right. That's the world. That's how it works. Yeah. Everything runs Linux in exactly that way now. Like the Google Play Store on Android is not open source. I cannot overstate how much I didn't know any of this when TiVo came out and still don't know some of it. But part of the pleasure of TiVo when you got it at that time was you didn't have to know anything. Like it was the classic tech thing where the big yellow button was the key. And then once you figured out how to deal with it, like you didn't have to think anything about the technology or the behavior of it. This is where I think the remote becomes a really important part of the story. Because I think the thing that they most correctly figured out at the very beginning was that the remote was the game. That you shouldn't actually have to spend a lot of time playing with the box. You should plug it in and then never think about it again. And that actually the remote is the interface. And they even talked about this at the very beginning. That we understood that the box was less important than what was on the screen. Which was much less important than the thing that you held in your hand. And it's like if you can make that feel usable and fun, we're gold. Is it called the Peanut? Yes. I still cannot figure out if that is the official name or if that's just whatever it is called. Because I just sort of remember people calling it the Peanut. And really, you know, I have had a lot of remotes. That's an amazing remote. It is. I think I would argue it is like the greatest TV remote ever. It is. And it's interesting because it looks as though it has an overly fancy pants like curvy design. but the design is really handleable. It's not heavy and it is not hard to figure out how to use. And the colors are exactly what you want. I don't know who the designers were for this. So is this company IDEO, which is this like legendary firm in San Francisco. They have this big, beautiful office on a pier in San Francisco. And they're like, everybody who wants to like build a cool product for like decades went to IDEO. And there's two things on this remote that you should notice. One is the giant pause button, which to Eli's point, they like really understood. But the other is the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, which I have mixed feelings about this. But go on. When did where did that come from? The very beginning. And this is like one of the things they thought was that, oh, maybe if we can give people a way to tell us what they like and don't like, we can recommend more stuff for them. Because one of the things that you had to do whenever you installed a TiVo was you had to connect it to the Internet. Wait, can I just play you this very brief setup clip that describes the very. This is just a chunk of the very first TiVo setup. You should have interviewed that guy. This is Howard Luck, actually, who we've mentioned before, and he is here to teach you how to use your TiVo. And this is the part where he explains the internet, and I love it very, very much. The next step is to connect your TiVo receiver to your phone line. Once a day, TiVo makes a short, toll-free phone call in order to bring you up to 14 days of program guide data, network showcases, and other exclusive offerings from the TiVo service. TiVo only makes this phone call when you're not using the phone, so you don't need to install a second line. We provided a phone splitter so you can plug your regular telephone and your TiVo receiver into the same phone jack. Simply plug one end of the phone cord into the splitter and the other end into the phone jack on the back of your TiVo receiver. So this is just like in case you forgot that it's the 90s. Here you go. They had this idea, like you can see in there somewhere, they're like, it's two tech guys who've been doing internet and computer things that they're like, oh, if we can connect this thing to the internet and it can just phone home, like we can, A, we can start to update the box over time. B, we can start to bring new features. There's just stuff that is going to become available to us over time. And one of their big ideas was what if we can do recommendations? Like what if we can do TV Guide better than TV Guide? Which I think is like just vastly ahead of its time in thinking about something like that in terms of how to show you stuff that you want to watch. It is very notable, by the way, that this hardware, this setup, all of it presumed you did not have internet access. Right. That the TiVo itself needed its own modem. It wasn't going to call over the open internet. It was going to literally call TiVo's house, wherever that was, download a program guide over whatever protocol it was going to use. It was all very proprietary. And that would enable a bunch of features that we would just fully take for granted over the internet. And again, like everything about TiVo, I loved this. The idea that it was calling it two in the morning and uploading new features and getting all the shows and everything. But the one thing I want to say about the algorithm is this is where – so I get my TiVo and I tell it I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then it immediately starts pouring Kung Fu shows onto my TiVo. This was the weird side effect of it. I felt judged by the TiVo. And I also felt unnerved by what it thought about me. And then I started getting into this kind of relationship with it where I wanted to choose shows that showed that I was classy and had good taste. And then it would pick other shows that were like them. And maybe it would think, well, like I actually liked good shows. And so I remember being very happy. I woke up and it was weird that it was picking shows that I hadn't programmed, that it was just thinking you might like this. And one time I got up and it had picked the musical Easter Parade. And I thought, yes, I love all fashion musicals. Now you're getting me. But I remember that HBO had this really sleazy reality show called G-String's Divas, which I actually liked. And I would not tell the TiVo to record it for me because I thought if it knows that I want to watch G-String Divas, it's going to give me all these sleazy things. You were hiding from the out there. For the viewer. You needed a Finsta. Yeah, exactly. The TiVo and the Feevo. This is ridiculous. I don't know who I thought cared. But I will tell you like a side thing. But you know how I said that I did this TV thing right when it came out where I was supposed to show how TiVo worked. So my TiVo or my TV broke at that time. My brother, apparently this runs in my family, also had a TiVo and he lived uptown. And so I called him and I said, can I, I have to do this TV hit for this Canadian thing where I demonstrate TiVo and my TV's broken. And he said, sure, come up. So I go up to his apartment and the TV guys come and they're filming this. So I turn on his TiVo. And of course, it's my brother's TiVo. All of the things are like cheesecake, sports, how to make beer. And I'm supposed to demonstrate for the cameras. And I was like, this isn't my stuff. Max in Magazine, the TiVo is here. It made me look like the weirdest. No, I watch G-String Divas. Yeah. Anyway, my point, my basic point, aside from telling you guys exactly what I was watching on my TiVo and what my brother was watching. is just that it gave you this tremendous self-consciousness about the patterns of your TV viewing, which I'm sure was not exactly their intent, but it just made me hyper-aware of my own taste and perversely desperate for my TiVo to like and admire me and give me the things that I wanted. It's hard for me to rewind my brain to a time when TiVo's great insight was it should always record everything, but only what was available in that time. It was like 14 hours of capacity, right? I can do this for you. I can do this for you. I can transport you back by telling you the most popular shows of 1999 and 2000. What would you like to guess was the number one show with a bullet on TV in 1999? That's going to be bad. It's just telling is all it is. It's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Oh, my God. Oh, of course. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was the first, second, and third most popular show. It was so weird. It was the revival of the game show. But that trend only lasted for two years. But the measurability of how many people were watching it, I think, shattered something in TV production for a long time. The other ones, this was ER was huge. Friends was huge. Frasier was huge. 60 Minutes was huge. The Practice was huge. And Touched by an Angel. Shouts to Touched by an Angel. This makes total sense. I feel like Touched by an Angel played a lot in the Pierce household. Oh, absolutely. If we'd had a TiVo, we would have had a season pass to Touched by an Angel. I only know if I've only gotten a few glimpses into teenage David's life. Touched by Angel is there. 100%. Roma Danny Jr., I got you. Actually, that's a nice lineup of shows. I thought it was going to be much more horrifying. It's actually like a good throwback to like a period when there were a lot of mass network shows that people like that were skillfully made. And, you know, people had affection for genuine reasons. So while this is happening, right, TiVo starts shipping. You were right, by the way. The first one, 14 hours of stuff. That was going to be my trivia question. So good pull for you. Not long after that, they gave you one that could do 30 hours. The 14-hour one was $500. The 30-hour one was $1,000. Yeah, that's insane. That's like we yell about like Apple upgrading storage for outrageous prices. This was bananas. And yeah, from the very beginning, you could pay $10 a month, $100 a year, or $200 once for lifetime service. And that lifetime eventually became another boat anchor. And that is what I got. You got the lifetime service? Of course. I knew I was going to keep it forever. I don't remember what the exact situation was, but as soon as they offered me that, I took that. And this is just a total side note. Whether or not the lifetime meant your lifetime or the lifetime of the TiVo box eventually becomes like an all-encompassing controversy. I was not asking questions at the time. I was like $200 for a lifetime relationship with TiVo. A lot of people believe that that meant their life, not the life of the box. The box. Yeah. And TiVo was like, what if you paid again? And that caused a whole lot of controversy later on. One more gadget thing that I have struggled to figure out here, which is TiVo was sort of a software company, sort of a hardware company. It came out, it had a bunch of partners from the beginning that were making boxes. But there was one that was considered the TiVo. Is that a fair way to say it? Yeah, it's the Philips one, right? That was the video we watched was the Philips one. Okay, so that was the flagship box. But then they had a DirecTV partnership pretty early on. They were doing stuff there. That was actually like a big win for DirecTV because it had the best DVR right out of the gate. The Philips one was like when people bought TiVos, it was the Philips one. That was when you could buy in the store. And at the time, again, this is all so hard to remember the structure of this industry. Yeah. I'm confident the younger people listening to this show, it won't even make sense. But these companies had to get manufacturing and distribution. And they didn't have it. There's no way a company of TiVos scale. There was no China, right? Like you couldn't just be like, drop ship me 500 new products. Like it just – it did not exist. So you had to go to some existing big company, do a licensing deal. That company would go to the Best Buys and CompUSAs and circuit cities of the world and say, we're going to distribute our products. And we're going to use our existing channel relationships and a bunch of – I mean they were all just like middle-aged white dudes in those striped button-up 90 shirts would get like hammered at a steakhouse. and they would make the deal and the products would end up at Best Buy in the next quarter. And that is how that whole industry worked. And it all looped around CES. And it all looped around CES. So if you were a company like TiVo, to get a product that you could sell to a customer in a store, your best option was to partner with Philips in one region and Sony in another region and down and down the line, all of them would have wildly different SKUs, wildly different products, and then you would have your DirecTV consumer relationship. And eventually, I think TiVo takes this over, right? They start shipping their own hardware because they're a big enough brand, a big enough company. But it is, I mean, now people start companies by basically opening a Squarespace and like linking it to Alibaba. And they're like, I have a company. And that simply, none of that existed. But the Philips one was the one. It is the definitive one that everyone thinks of because it was the one that was in the most stores in America. Got it. All right. We've launched this thing. Now let's take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about what made TiVo TiVo and why it both did and super did not work. We'll be right back. 30 minutes. Elevate your hustle with routines, strategies, and mindset shifts that I have pressure tested. I have burnt down this Beyonce candle like all the way to the bottom. We have been trying to manifest. Carves are not the enemy. I probably have a piece of bread or a bagel with me at all times, and I am not exaggerating. Tune in on February 24th for episode one, Building the Skill of Self-Talk. This is the foundation. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go. All right, we're back. And just to get us back into this, I just want to play a voicemail that we got when we asked people for thoughts about TiVo. Hey, Virgcast, this is Gatley out here in Seattle. And my quick TiVo story is the story of how my dad, probably one of the only times my dad was impressed with me when I was able to do the secret TiVo code on the remote where you do select, play, select, 3-0 select on the numpad. And that would allow the fast forward button to transition into a 30 second skip button. I premiered that during an episode of 24 when there was commercials going on. I put the code in and his eyes just lit up. It was the only time he's ever been proud of me, I'm pretty sure. That's my favorite TiVo memory. Emily, did that just play your mind a little bit? It did. I don't remember whether I knew the code. First of all, I'm a little concerned about the family dynamics. But beyond that, yeah, the fact that you could, how much did it skip? 30 seconds. 30 seconds, which was an amazing feeling because television had always been completely connected to, you were just, you had to watch the ads and the ads sucked and now they're back. But for a long time, they were gone. Like you could skip past them. And I sort of remember some sense that the industry was panicking. I didn't care. They were freaking out. Yeah. I remember once having a conversation with someone in advertising at a party where they said, I was just talking about TiVo or something, and they were like, why can't you just watch the ads? That's a crazy way to talk about this. I was like, I don't want to watch the ads. The thing is, TV had always been inseparable from advertising The entire reason that things had three or four acts was so a certain amount of ads could run between them the whole idea of product integration and you know all of this stuff went back to like when TV was originally invented as a live platform that you got on a little screen in your living room The whole idea was how can we use this for advertising? So the sudden appearance of anything that would allow you to skip past the advertisements either while rewatching it or, you know, while you pause it and then just rewind it. Just any way of skipping it seemed like an incredible miracle. So I understand why they were upset about that. And people clearly spent years making sure that that would never, ever happen again. And now we're stuck with these streaming situations where it's like you have to pay more in order to skip the ads. And then they're like, psych. One of the memories this brought up for me was this like immediate new behavior that you would like, at least that I did, where you would start a show and then immediately pause it. Yes. Go somewhere for 10 minutes. go do something and then come back to watch the show and just blow through the commercials. Yeah. It's just like, okay, if I just leave for 18 minutes, I can just fly through without any of the commercials. And this is just like a thing people instantly understood and started to do. So I mentioned Replay TV, this other company that was doing DVR stuff around the same time. They actually had a button that would just immediately let you skip the commercial. And that got it in gigantic legal copyright issues. They had big fights. They lost those big fights like replay TV largely doesn't exist in some ways because it had a button that let you just in one go skip Marshall boy did Anthony would learn that lesson right TiVo at least ostensibly didn't and and Devo managed to very successfully make the argument that by fast forwarding through the ad you are still in some meaningful way watching the ad and so it's okay showing it to you really fast is is fine not showing it to you at all is not fine and this became a thing. Obviously, all the cable companies hated TiVo. One thing I thought was really interesting that I found was a bunch of the content partners decided to partner directly with TiVo. So AOL, this was peak AOL, was a big investor in TiVo, and they were going to do some big AOL TV partnership. Again, everybody's obsessed with how do we do TV and the internet in your living room. Discovery and NBC had also invested in TiVo. There was this sense that this is a place for content that we can do stuff, and the cable companies just absolutely hated its guts. Right, because they own distribution. They had monopolies, regional monopolies and distribution. Well, and again, you can see it's like it calls home at 2 a.m. every night. They're like they saw what that would eventually become. And it's like we can just do all kinds of stuff that don't require this dumbass cable card that you have to put into your TV. You're giving everyone so much credit. The AOL executives, the NBC executives. No, no, no, not the AOL executives. No one had any vision whatsoever. I think the TiVo guys saw this. I think the TiVo guys saw this. I don't think anybody else saw this. I think the TiVo guys saw it. They were just there. They did it wrong. But I think they had this idea of like this thing is a computer that looks like a TV and that is powerful. And I think there is something to that. But they also just like didn't successfully do any of that stuff. So they ran into this problem. We're just talking about the first generation TiVo. The first generation TiVo, this is important. I swear to God this is important. You just plugged the antenna or your analog cable feed right into the back of it. Yeah. And it had its own tuners, and it was in charge. Like, it was an end-to-end, it was an appliance. It was just a complete system. It was literally pulling in the content from the airwaves or from analog cable. It had its own tuner. It was changing the channel itself and recording it directly. Around this time, the cable companies are terrified. They are transitioning to 500 channels and digital cable systems, and they're putting out their own cable boxes with encrypted signals. and you get to a place where the TiVo can't work unless it's sitting on top of another cable box. And now you're in the real fight. That fight between who is going to own the programming, who's going to target the ads, it all exists now in a very real way. But that's the real glimmer of not only are we letting you fast forward the commercials, we're sitting on top of your, literally sitting on top of your hardware and disintermediating your interface. the cable companies were like, we're going to kill you. Yeah, I remember this. But again, I remember this only in the sense that I was so desperate to maintain my relationship with TiVo that whatever came along, whether I needed to have whatever relationship with the cable box or later, whatever bizarre cards that I had to buy, I had already become very attached to this. When you said bizarre cards, I just felt like full body PTSD. Boy, did I spend a lot of time covering the bizarre cards. Again, I think we're going to end up there. And just really quick trivia question for you. How many TiVos do you think TiVos sold in 1999, the first year it shipped? It shipped March 31st, which technically it hit its Q1 goal by one day. Congratulations to them. How many do you think it sold first year? I cannot guess. 100,000. This is Price is Right. Yeah. All right. He gets us 100,000. I don't know anything about how many things people sell. 48,000 TiVos that first year. and then they sold about a few hundred thousand a year after that. And just to give away the fact that blew my mind the most, the peak number of concurrent TiVo subscribers came in 2008. Do either of you want to guess how many it was? I'm going to say 500,000. It was more than that, mercifully. 1.7 million. Okay. So that was that peak TiVo. I just added up five years of sales. Peak TiVo was 1.7 million people. The few, the proud, the best people in the country. Yeah. We were together. We were linked forever. It's nuts. I would have guessed like 10 times that. No, it's because TiVo was a verb. Yes. It remains a verb to this day. The boops, the sounds, the cultural consciousness. The interface is still the thing. Yeah, like the beautiful, the green, the little, the curved little ways in which it showed things. the logo where was the dancing with the feet and the antenna. Can I play you a little intro thing they have from this is from 1999. It says, introducing the new face of television and it's just a little TiVo animation. It's just a bunch of little balls. Oh my god, it's the beginning of the morning show. There's the little TiVo guy. That was it. There's a little TiVo guy. A bunch of this stuff is all sort of tied up in one thing that TiVo did very early on which was give TiVos to everybody. Anyone who was anyone in Hollywood was given a TiVo by TiVo. They estimated giving thousands upon thousands of them away. That's very smart and it should have worked. Well, so in a certain way, it really did. Like I think the fact that TiVo became TiVo, like the fact that people still talk about TiVo now is directly because of that. It didn't seem to increase sales in particular. But like, let me just play you a few clips I found of like particularly TiVo-y cultural moments. Here's one from Sex and the City. And just to set up this clip, I believe it's Miranda has a TiVo that she is in like a deep and loving relationship with. And she comes home to find that all of her stuff has been deleted, which is like at this particular moment, like a true shared cultural nightmare. You sat on TiVo? Is it okay? This is a very funny episode. Nothing is recorded. How could you do this? This is Jules and Mimi the morning after. No, no, no, no, no. Yes. What came up in this research so many times is the relationship people had with the list of titles in their library. And it's like you would set up your season passes to record shows as they came out. And you would guard a few of your favorite episodes of your favorite shows with your life. And you would set it to never delete, which was key for me. Like there were a few shows that I was like, never delete. And you really had to like inform the two-go. Because it would kind of do a like first in, last out thing, right? Yes. It would just cycle it out as you went. Or it would keep them for a week. You know, like you could do different kinds of settings on this. But it was fun when people would come over. And for somebody like me, because I did collect TV to some extent, like I would tape things on my VCR. It was exciting to have them all visually collected in one place. And if somebody came over, just the fact that you could be like this concierge to your television and be like, hello, welcome. Let's watch season three episode of Sex and the City. This is exactly the same impulses curating your iPod. Yes. Right. This is this moment in media where it's still not everything. It's still not infinite slop. But you have so much more control that everything feels very personal. And so like what's on your iPod was a very famous ad campaign. What's on your TiVo is also an expression. of like your personality. Whereas what's on your Netflix means nothing. Well, TiVo over time starts to do this really fun stuff where like there was a whole section of the TiVo website that was just what was on celebrities now playing lists. And this is like a way to get to know people. But this is so crazy to me. I think I remember when that came out because I was like, they stole my idea. Because when TiVo first started, one of the first thoughts that I had about it was I thought I would like to watch what Michael Stipe is watching. You know, like just, I wish, I immediately even before they did that thought people would like to know what other people's tastes are, which did end up becoming, you know, a big aspect. And so the idea of having a public view of somebody else's TV watching, I think at the time I thought it would be interesting if you signed up and you literally watched what they watched while they watched it. I still think that would be kind of interesting. It just kicks your TV on the second basis. Yeah, for a reason it's only Michael Stipe. It's only Michael Stipe. But anyway, so that is how people who have TiVo feel about TiVo. I think this stuff is not totally dissimilar from what it was like to be Emily Nussbaum in your home media environment watching TVA. I really felt like I was very happy and grateful for it all the time. But they couldn't make anybody buy the damn thing. I think there's two things that were happening simultaneously, as far as I can tell. One is that everybody realizes how cool this basic functionality is and that it's relatively easy to copy and go do on your own device. So everybody else just starts making DVRs. That turns into a whole thing. But all of a sudden, other DVRs start to pop up around. And many of them come in the box that you get from your cable company. And this is what I think it really was. TiVo was an extra expense, an extra subscription, and famously kind of difficult to get up and running. Okay, it was an extra subscription unless you had a lifetime membership. Well, sure, but that's another. I mean, that's $400 I don't have to spend. I'm just telling you why I did not drop it for a DVR. Yeah. But anyway, go on. It was your lifetime. However long. So TiVo had built a lot, I think reasonably built a giant patent library through this whole thing. They invented a lot of this stuff, patented the hell out of all of it. And then- They had one, the important one was the time warp patent that we can pause and fast forward my TV. And they just went to war with everybody who did this and wound up winning. the estimates I saw were that it won more than a billion dollars in the lawsuits against other companies, which I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like a lot of money to win in patent lawsuits. But basically what happens here is this turns TiVo from an innovative hardware company into a patent troll. It essentially became a patent troll. And this is where we have baby blogger Nilay Patel in 2009 writing essentially, why hasn't TiVo done anything interesting in a decade? And the answer is because it became a patent troll. It spent all of its money litigating what it had done in 1999 rather than making anything else. Let's rewrite history and figure out how TiVo could have saved itself. Is there something? I'm just like clicking backwards. You just want the sounds back. I'm like, yes. I'm like, could they have lowered the price? Like the way that, you know, because television itself, when it began, was an incredibly expensive project that only a tiny niche of annoying technology consumers bought that were fancy people who could afford to pay for an expensive thing. And then they started mass marketing them and the price dropped and the entire medium changed and everybody considered it instead of a fancy show off thing, something that everybody had in their living room and all the stuff that was shown on it changed. So could TiVo have? One alternate history I think is really interesting is there was a faction inside of TiVo that wanted them to start licensing the software for almost nothing from the very beginning and basically try to be Windows or what Android eventually was. And it was like, instead of, you know, sort of reverse fighting this fight, because what eventually happened is all these DVD or all these DVR manufacturers just started putting a powered by TiVo sticker on their shitty thing, which solved nothing, but it made TiVo some licensing money. But there were a bunch of people who were like, what we should have done is I think the quote was license it for a dollar and get it everywhere. Was just like, if we can be the ones who win at software, that makes us powerful. Right. And I think that's a really interesting other outcome here that it is like if TiVo could have become the like ubiquitous layer under all of this, what like Roku and Fire TV are now. And because even TiVo was relatively early to the idea that like, oh, we should actually incorporate all these streaming services. It was too late to it to save TiVo. But the idea of like, what if we put all of this stuff into one guide was, I think, the right idea in a lot of ways. And it's just not the industry has not allowed it. But like if TiVo had made itself the software layer underneath televisions everywhere instead of for 1.7 million people. So is that the equivalent of like when AOL sent out all the DVDs and like all the. Well, I was going to say the other thing is send out movies by DVD and just eat Netflix alive. Like that's the way. It's nice that people think that TiVo could have done this. TiVo could have never, never done these things. I'm going to say something nice about cable companies. What? It's very out of character for me. I don't like this at all. I'm going to say something nice. I promise this is not product placement. Think about how TiVo architected where the stuff was. Right? So TiVo's idea at scale, let's say they put the software everywhere. Their idea, if you just draw the diagram, is someone will broadcast friends, and then we will have hundreds of millions of copies of friends on hard drives scattered throughout the country. Yeah. This is stupid. Like it's just fundamentally the wrong answer. And so when the cable companies looked at this, they said, why on earth are we going to have literal copies of friends on people's hard drives throughout our entire customer base that we can't see, that we can't monetize, we can't measure? What we're going to do is we're going to have one copy of friends. And when you ask for it, we'll play it for you. And you can save it. And we'll make all the lists and we'll do all this stuff. And because some of you insist on recording some stuff that we don't want to store, we'll let you have your DVR. And then the DVR will be crappy, but whatever. But what we really want to do is we want to push you to having this stuff centrally. Like on-demand streaming. When TiVo started filing all of its patent lawsuits, the way the company's got around this is by saying, okay, fine. We think actually having hundreds of hard drives, hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of hard drives everywhere is in fact stupid. So we will centralize the service. This is, I think they sued Replay TV. Replay TV eventually goes to like cloud DVRs. The idea that you will have a cloud DVR quickly becomes the solution. Yeah. And TiVo is just not architected for this. Like from the beginning, they're architected over, we're going to put a VCR in your living room, but instead of a tape, it's going to have a hard drive in it. Right. They would have had to basically look at their own patent revenue and say, well, we have a patent on the thing that nobody wants. We're going to stop suing them. We're going to build a thing that is obviously the future. And they could, there was no, that company could not do it. This is why they did nothing for a decade. Right. They could not look at that piggy bank and turn even like one degree off of being laser focused on collecting that money To the point that when they did the big update to TiVo in 2010 they were so confused about what people wanted They're like, we've done it, everybody. We've rebuilt all of TiVo. We finally did it. It runs Adobe Flash. And the consumers were like, yeah, nobody wants that shit. The stuff that plays the video games? No, thank you. We want Netflix. We want Roku. And they quickly, like immediately lost the war because the product was architected for a moment in time. And TiVo didn't grow with that. So even if they'd put the software everywhere, the idea that we should have, you know, millions of copies of the same show individually stored all over the place. Like in 2025, that makes no sense. So we've essentially reached the end of the TiVo story. The actual end of the TiVo story is it sells to a company called Rovi for $1.1 billion and goes from being a patent troll to a larger patent troll. And that is essentially the current state of TiVo. They kept trying to sell boxes. They kept trying to license stuff. And now they are essentially just a patent troll. But, Emily, we're just going to end before we get to the Virgin History questions with I have a question for you. I found a story from 2019, the year of our Lord 2019, that suggested you still had a working TiVo in your house that you still used. No comment. It seems likely because there was a – I don't remember exactly the point that I blacked out and got a Roku, but at some point that happened. And I remember having conversations on, I don't know, Twitter with Alan Sepinwall, where I was like trying to figure out what I should get because this is clearly untenable. But yeah, I guess I still did. I mean, I have to say truthfully, I don't have a great TV setup at home. I'm not writing the TV column anymore. But people were sometimes surprised by this. I had this old school technology and I had. The first time we met, I remember being like, I should help her. But the thing is, I was. I mean, I was thinking to myself. Well, the crazy thing is my thought about it was always like I want to watch TV like a lot of people watch TV. Like not everybody has a fancy media center. Home media environment. Home media environment. I was like, you know, when it started streaming on computers and on phones, I watched it on computers and on phones. And I was like, it's important to understand the context. And, you know, I only have so much room on my wall for it. So I don't have like the hugest screen. And my TiVo worked. So I just used it. But, yes, I stand by my insane loyalty to TiVo. I love this. I love it for you. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back to the version history questions. We'll be right back. All right. We're back. As always, it is time for the eight version history questions. Question number one is where does TiVo fit on the time matrix? The time matrix describes right idea, wrong idea, right time, wrong time. And it belongs somewhere on this. A fact I should tell everybody is that Emily was the creator of the Approval Matrix, the fact that we just completely ripped off for this segment. It's okay. You guys are not the first people to make it. And is it possible that we created this because Emily was coming on the show and are going to use it forever? Yes, it is, in fact, possible. Where do we think this belongs? It was clearly the right idea at the wrong time. I think you could make an argument it was the right idea at the right time for all the things you were just saying, Eli. I'm saying it's the middle of the box. It was absolutely the right idea, but it was not the right time. You think it goes right here? It met its moment. It did. I agree. Right? We should be able to pause TV. Here's the technology. We can actually build it. It's going to become a cultural phenomenon. And then the architecture of how everything is distributed will change. And you will become nothing but ruthless patent trolls that everyone hates. You will become nothing. I like that you used the little TiVo alien with its little TV antennas. I've always found that mascot just like slightly ominous. It is ominous, but I like it. It's got dead eyes. It's a little bit like the last thing you see before you die kind of vibes. So are the eyes the I and the O? It's unclear. I've always just looked at that and been like, that thing's dead inside. Like, that's just what I've got. I guess I'm drawn to things that are dead inside. Emily, do you agree with this assertion? Very right idea, kind of right time. It's just one of those things where by definition it's at the wrong time. But I just believe that it's the right idea. So to me, it was the right time. Apparently for the world, it was the wrong time. But it looks like it's an okay place to put it in the box. Excellent. All right. Question number two. Was TiVo peak anything? TiVo was peak TiVo. Do you know what I mean? No. Like, no. It's a noun. You can give me, I'll give you peak DVR if that's an argument you want to make. But TiVo is, TiVo was peak TiVo. No, Neelai is peak Neelai. Like, that's nothing. All day, every day. You know, when was Faith Popcorn making all of these statements about cocooning? like how everybody was going to stay home and watch things. Like this is, you know, there was a level at which TiVo was, I'm not going to say peak. I don't know what that is. But, you know, that was a moment that there was this idea that you're going to be able to have access to all the entertainment you want and you can be cozy and control it. And so to me it was like. What do you call this era, right? The very late 90s into, let's say, 2004. Whatever that thing. Pre-social networking and at a point, you know, like, why don't you call it that sound that made when you plugged in your phone in it the handshake? It's the handshake era. It's where everybody's meeting the technology, but it requires a tiny bit of effort. And so it's where, I don't know, you can't call it the handshake era. I have a couple I would like to offer you. I think TiVo was peak TV remote, and I don't think it's close. Yeah, that's good. Oh, the perfect TV remote? Yeah, I don't think remotes have ever been as good before. 100% agree. I did find an old Engadget post by you, Neelai, that was like, this remote's fine, but I want the one with the full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I have the one. I was like, I don't think you understand. We'll make sure there's an insert of my TiVo remote collection, including the one where this part, the top, slides up and it reveals a QWERTY keyboard. The software that this keyboard was intended to address was horrible. So you'd push a button and then like 10 minutes later, a letter would appear with the TiVo sound. Like you'd go boop. All this is horrible, but the remote itself was a delight. The one other one I would like to offer you is peak TV sound effects. And just to jog your memory, I would like to play you an 11-second video on YouTube of all of the TiVo sound effects. Yeah, it's good stuff. See, this is for me ASMR. This is my ASMR. Oh, that bonk. The bonk was really good. The bonk was terrible, actually. Like, it's good, but it was alarming. But it hurts. It causes you pain. Yeah, it's dissonant. Can I tell you a fun story about these sounds? So these sounds were based, they're like inspiration was the three note sound from the NBC Sonic logo. NBC. Yeah. And they were like, we want something that is like that iconic. And they hired this guy, Ed Allard, to do it. Ed is like a gaming industry legend. He helped make games like Plants Versus Zombies and Bejeweled. Wow. Huge guy. His brother is Jay Allard, who led the Xbox 360 project at Microsoft also tried to take over the living room with computers. But anyway, so this guy just randomly composed the greatest sounds in the history of television. But he's just at home with a marimba being like, bong. Literally, yeah. That's great. Yeah, so kudos to Ed Allard. Question number three, which I think we've talked about a little bit, Emily, is if you could time travel back and take this thing over yourself, could you make it more successful? I mean, clearly not. Maybe. I think you, Neil, I did make a pretty compelling case that like it had its moment and that was it. Clearly I could not do anything to save it other than, I don't know, maybe they charge everybody just, they pay everybody $20 to get a TiVo in their home. And then they implant them all over the country. And then nobody can give them up because they're just addicted to the sound. Yeah, exactly. This is very much like the Uber model, which is like, we will give free taxi rides to every 20-year-old in New York for a decade. Until there are no taxis left. Until the taxis are gone. And then we will raise the rates to astronomical levels. Question number four, will the youth ever make it cool again? Are we headed towards a TiVo retro nostalgia movement? Well, I have a 17-year-old son. All of his friends are extremely into old technology in such a funny way to me. They're into playing vinyl albums and they buy each other as presents, small, old-fashioned cameras and things like that. But I don't see how TiVo could be in that category. You can't use it. It's not like, what, are you going to turn it into a planter? I know. I do think the spirit of it, because as you've been talking about all this stuff about collecting and the idea of sort of wanting something that's yours, that I think is coming back in a big way, in a lot of ways. And we're seeing that in a lot of ways, but there is no, like that goes back to DVDs more quickly than it goes back to TiVo. Yeah, that's the thing is I absolutely understand and identify with the desire to collect a million DVDs out of terror that these companies that own all, You know, especially because some of the best television shows are tiny shows that had miniature audiences. They did nothing in terms of ratings, but they were just interesting shows and you want to own them. The only way to do it is to have it as a physical object. TiVo doesn't have that quality. I can understand using a bunch of beautiful TiVo remote controls around your house as some sort of, I don't know, decorative device. But I don't see how. As I've done. Yeah. It's a very low WAF. I can imagine. All right. What feature of TiVo would you take and apply on every current TV streaming device? What can we lift off of TiVo and stick onto your Roku that would make you happier? Search. Yeah. Yeah. You just want to be able to search and it would just tell you anything that was available that's on. I mean, you can sort of do that. What did they call it? They call it swivel search? Yeah. So the swivel search was like you could search for the office and then sort of pivot over to searching Steve Carell. I literally forgot how cool this was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's like an explore system that really doesn't exist. Yeah. Actually, I forgot about that. I would put in the names of creators that I liked or certain shows and it would tell me things that were like it. And yeah, it was a very powerful search engine. And that was at a time when search was really just finding itself. So it was. Well, you know, because they were in control of their own program. Yeah. Right. So they are building the database of programming, knowing how they wanted to search it, which is I think Roku search is still bad. It might be the best, but it's still bad. It's still it's not great. Apple search hilariously nerfed by Netflix, which doesn't want to participate. And then all those databases are not built for any single search engine. You would think with all the AI that we have now, we could solve this problem. It's just the most natural thing for you to want to do. And also the TiVo one was very welcoming in that you would search for one thing and you could see the names of various different other actors. So it would sort of remind you, I like Steve Carell. I like so-and-so. Oh, I wonder what he's done. Like, you know, it actually led to that kind of Internet rabbit hole behavior before the Internet really had the capacity to do a lot of that. It was cool. It sort of reminded you of the landscape of what was out there in terms of other TV creations. And there was nothing else that did that. It's funny because I do remember that people would then develop Nostalgia for TV Guide, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But it definitely replaced it. Just go to Marriott somewhere and you can have your Nostalgia for TV Guide. It'll be fine. All right. three more questions these are the version history hall of fame criteria questions criteria question number one did this product do something truly new i think with tivo this is easy yes absolutely yeah okay criteria question number two was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad i mean i think it was remarkably good yeah that's an easy one yeah it's moment it was okay i think i think that's right this is actually until it became a devastating patent troll and forgot to innovate for a decade. That is true. I think we're at like 1999 TiVo. Okay. Not the later one that I reviewed in 2010 that ran Flash. Not the like, we got a bunch of emails from people who were like, I loved my Romeo. And I was like, no, you didn't. I don't believe that. This one I actually think might be slightly more complicated. Criteria question number three, did it have a lasting impact? Yes. Can I show you my evidence of lasting impact? This might be the single best story. The single most important investigative journalism I've ever done on TheVerge.com. Oh, Lord. OK. It's a story I wrote during Donald Trump's first term. Here's the headline. Does Trump have a state of the art super TiVo or just direct TV? Because he ran around. I think he still runs around saying the White House has a state of the art super TiVo. And the whole press corps at the White House just ran with it. Yeah, I remember him saying this all the time. What constitutes a Super TiVo? I don't know, but I was like, hey, guys, can anyone ask him one question about what a state-of-the-art Super TiVo is? And then finally he does an interview with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, and there's a brief shot of a remote on the table. And I was like, oh, there it is. This is Neil Ives Zapruderfield. And you zoom in, and it is a $4 DirecTV remote. because DirecTV at that time had a DVR that had like five tuners or something, and it could show four programs at once. And so he could record a bunch of shows and he could watch like all the cable news. And everyone looked at this. And in their brains, the words that got assembled were, that's a super TiVo. Well, that just shows outlasting the word TiVo. That's what I mean. This is like the most impact you have. They're looking at a product from another company that is branded. That remote has DirecTV branding on it. They're looking at its program guide. They're looking at the features that company advertises during NFL football games. And they're like, Super TiVo. Super TiVo. Whatever that is, whatever that means, it's a state-of-the-art Super TiVo. I knew I was going to have to answer the Virgin History Hall of Fame question. And I was like, this is all you need to know. There it is. Emily, what do you think? Lasting impact? I mean. On you, certainly. Yes. Easy win. I mean, yeah. I mean, I know that it didn't itself survive, but all of the essential insights that this machine had into how people did and could watch television have been incorporated into the world. Like, including people's expectations. Because what it changed was my expectations of what I could get. Like that I could get shows when I wanted, that I could just tell something that I was interested in a certain show and it would bear in mind when it was on and I wouldn't have to pay attention to it. And especially pause, rewind, and the little skipping fast forward. Like those are things that seem small but genuinely change people's relationship with what television is and also really change things for television creators in ways that are like too broad to go into. So, yeah, I think it matches all of these. All right. Done. TiVo, welcome to the Virgin History Hall of Fame. Oh, absolutely. It feels right. It would have been wrong if it didn't belong in there. It's TiVo. All right. We are done here. Thank you both for doing this. This was incredibly fun. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. Come back next time for the TiVo Bowl. It was emotionally draining hearing those sounds. Thank you to everybody who is watching and listening. This is tremendously fun. And if you want to support everything that we're doing, the best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge, read Emily's work, buy the books, read things. That's what we're here for. And watch things and listen to things. This is what we do. We love it. We will be back next time on Version History. Thank you, as always. See you next time. Version History is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffron. 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