TiVo
More info
- Creator
- Jim Barton, Mike Ramsay
- Released
- 1997
- Type
- Digital video recorder
- Owner
- Xperi (since 2020)
The American recording box that taught viewers to skip adverts and taught Richard Stallman a new word.
Barton and Ramsay came from Silicon Graphics and founded the company in 1997. The first box shipped in 1999: a hard drive, a programme guide downloaded over the phone line and a thumbs-up button to teach it what you liked. Pausing live TV and fast-forwarding through commercials was novel enough that "to TiVo" became an American verb, to the broadcasters' dismay.
The box ran Linux, and TiVo published the source code as the GPL requires — but the hardware refused to run modified software. Stallman named the practice tivoization, and GPLv3 in 2007 gained a clause aimed squarely at it. These days the company lives mostly off patents; Rovi bought it in 2016 and took the TiVo name, and in 2020 it merged into Xperi.