1999, TIVO

It was the year 1990 something and we have moved from the VCR to record stuff off of TV. With the invention of cable, there are just so many things that you can record and besides you would have to change out the tapes to keep recording.

Once you wanted to watch something you would have to sort through the tape and find it. What a pain in the butt.

1999

TIVO came around, wait what the heck is this. Well, it is a digital video recorder (DVR).  Yes you have heard that right a Digital Video Recorder so you can record things off of that thing called a television

How it works

Well it receives program information updates, which includes

• Description
• Regular and guest actors
• Directors
• Genres
• New or repeats

You can record a whole season, you can also pick the First Run episodes or all of them.

So what happens when you have like three different programs you want to watch, well you would have to pick out what is your favorite. Then it would try to record the others later. When the dual DVR tuner came out it was better. 

Until the hard drive is filled up

It also records on what was called household viewing habits that means that you can rate a show with either up thumbs up or down. Then it could give you some good recommendations.

Parental Controls

Yes, it had something called KidZone it was removed in the Premiere and Roamio versions. This gave parents better control over what their kids could watch on TV.

Subscription Service

Of course, you had to pay for this service. Lifetime subscription remains as long as the account is active. I could go further into it but why.

Hard Drive expansion

They teamed up with Western Digital to create an external hard drive. You could plug this in and it gave you more room. Up to 140  hours Which led to the satellite and cable companies options for their DVR up to 2TB drives.

Summary

The TiVo improved the options to record stuff you want to watch off of TV and paved the way for others to improve it.  Right now I know that we have 5 DVR tuners so we can record up to 5 different shows at once.  I think we have up to 1TB in storage. (I don’t use it as I have 16TB of shows I watch) my wife loves it.

Citation

I used wikipedia.org for information