How TiVo changed TV forever | Version History

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Silicon Graphics, Time Warner Cable, Emily Newsbomb, Neal Patel
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Paul Allen, Replay TV
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Direct TV
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Replay TV, Sex in the City
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Emily Newsbomb, Replay TV
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Direct TV
7. 1:00:00 – 1:02:24: Direct TV

Notable quotes from "How TiVo changed TV forever | Version History"

• 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…

  about Emily Newsbomb · at 0:00

• That's in keeping with to the only thing to do if you have a tiny amount of success is get the patent and sue everybody. Sue the hell out of everybody for it. All right, we're…

  about Silicon Graphics · at 4:44

• Living room, even though a hard drive was way better and more reliable than anything else. So they go to visit, a bunch of folks trying to get investors. And one of the people…

  about Replay TV · at 12:34

• You got the service. 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…

  about Direct TV · at 25:46

• No, it's because to was a verb. Yes. It remains a verb to this day. It the boops, the sounds and cultural consciousness. The interface is still the thing. Yeah. Like the…

  about Sex in the City · at 36:21

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Emily Newsbomb — Person · 2 mentions · first at 0:42
• Paul Allen — Person · 2 mentions · first at 12:34
  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…
• Neal Patel — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:42
  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…

Books & papers

• Sex in the City — Book · 2 mentions · first at 37:22

Companies & orgs

• Tivo — Company · 6 mentions
• Direct TV — Company · 5 mentions · first at 26:38
• Replay TV — Company · 4 mentions · first at 13:20
• Silicon Graphics — Company · 3 mentions · first at 4:44
• Roku — Company · 3 mentions
• Time Warner Cable — Company · 2 mentions · first at 5:09
  That's in keeping with to the only thing to do if you have a tiny amount of success is get the patent and sue everybody. Sue the hell out of everybody for it. All right, we're…
• Virgin Vox Media — Company · 1 mention · first at 0:00
  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…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 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 Virgin Vox Media, this is Virgin 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 to

0:42 All right, we're back. Let's talk to Neil Patel is here. Hi, Neil. Hey, Emily Newsbomb. Welcome. Thank you for coming to do this with us.

0:42 Hello. Thank you for having me. you I believe the two of you I I sincerely believe this are like America's greatest scholars and fans of to over time and I have a mountain of evidence to prove this.

0:42 It's fair to say both of you were early and late to to Is that fair? Loyal to this day still long after No. Yeah. No. Yeah. I got to as soon as I heard of it, I think I mean I I don't I don't remember my exact entrance ramp, but the minute I heard there was something better than my horrible VCR and I 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.

1:13 Um this was one of those cases where I got something and it actually genuinely felt like a miracle, like a life-changing device.

1:39 Was it just the recording? Part of it was the fact that I uh 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 uh skyhigh 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 8:00. And then you had to move these little dials. So to 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 it was it was huge. And then and then this thing happened right away, which is that the to decided

2:31 that because I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was evidence of what else I liked, which it decided was kung fu. Yeah.

2:31 Oh, sure. An early broken Tik Tok algorithm. Yes. Okay. What What about you? How'd you come to?

2:31 I mean, I was a gadget blogger in the mid to late 2000s. There there weren't smartphones, right? You know,

2:31 you got to write about something. The to was the gadget. It was a Linux computer that threatened to revolutionize the TV industry. It was in a constant lovehate 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 there was an ideological battle over the soul of Linux that was contained in

3:00 that. Yeah. There was almost no product that we could write about at Ngadget in like 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 they were what Tivo was doing and how it reflected all of their preconceived notions about gadgets in the living room and then no one bought the product. Like Emily bought the product.

3:29 I did not know this. See, I had a very very different experience with 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 founded in Rantivo felt the same way. They just never proved the case.

3:54 And 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 to asked me to appear on it and so somewhere out there's a there's a clip of me sounding like a cult member.

4:18 You are the world's first to influencer. That's see that's there's your patent litigation. you should be out there. That's in keeping with to the only thing to do if you have a tiny amount of success is get the patent and sue everybody.

4:44 Sue the hell out of everybody for it. All right, we're going to get to that. Uh, but let's let's just start the story all the way back at the beginning. So, we're at like we're in the mid '90s. Uh, 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. Uh, and basically Mike at Silicon Graphics had been selling these like super expensive workstations to Hollywood. Basically, like really expensive ways to use this stuff to make movies. Uh, and Jim was part of a team supporting uh, a thing called the Orlando Project at Time Warner Cable. Does this ring a bell to you in particular, Nei Patel?

5:09 No, this is this is at least slightly before my time. This is Yeah. Okay. So, this is like Yeah, this is college Nei. Yeah,

5:35 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

5:35 was it Orlando? It was in fact Orlando. You never It's just the cable company being like, "It's going to be Somerset, Florida, but we're calling it the Orlando." Totally in character

5:35 100%. What was interactive? So, it was this big idea like this was the early internet and it was it was like peak cable, right? 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 uh Neil, as I think you can vouch for, a dream many people have had many times.

6:01 Yes. Over the years, and it never works. So this one died also. Uh the Orlando Project is like a deep and weird rabbit hole that I encourage everybody to go down.

6:01 Although a good band name. It is a good band name. Like a SCA band is kind of what I imagine when I think of the Orlando Project. But anyway, so so Mike and Jim have this idea that uh 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 there in 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 a just a completely dead idea. But then uh Jim Barton said this uh about one of the 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

7:09 bathroom." And I realized I know how to do that. And thus began pause the TV or go to the bathroom.

7:09 Both. This is a genuinely genius insight. Like 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 he should be able to forward past the commercials? That that comes later.

7:58 Okay. But yeah, I I think you're right. that that one insight is I think if you boil to all the way down it is that thing

7:58 it was and I remember how big a deal it was. I never had to. Uh my family was on like

7:58 No one did. David two. We were the only two customers right here. My job deliver like I used it all the time.

7:58 But we 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.

8:25 So, I just want to say a couple things. One, first remote, the biggest button was the pause button.

8:25 Oh, really? They 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

8:51 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 you can just you can just see what happened after that.

9:16 Yeah. And 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. And if you

9:41 was ephemeral, right? 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, were 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, right? 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.

10:31 Yeah. So I 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. Uh so these two guys go off and start this company. They originally call it tele world and I think a very fun question is would we talk about tele world the way we talk about to think the answer is absolutely not. Like to became a verb in the way that I'm gonna tell a world that. So wait, where is to the name come from?

10:54 So I've seen and read a bunch of theories about where this name came from. And the the I think it is like con mythology, but what it seems to be is they they set out to build the next TV. So they wanted to have TV in there and then the thing that I think is has been applied later is they took IO for like input output on a on a computer, shoved them together and made to

11:23 Didn't they hire some famous design company? I always just assumed that they hired like Frog or IDO ordo IDO in fact

11:23 and they and IDO did all the user interface design and the sounds and the remote and I'm guessing they were like

11:23 make it a cute to guy and we'll call it like that's what you hire a company like that to do.

11:23 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 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 like what you're talking about with with VCRs and VHS is like 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 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

12:34 living room, even though a hard drive was way better and more reliable than anything else. So they uh 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 was the co-founder of Microsoft. And I only bring this up because I found this amazing story. This is from uh Howard Look, who was an early executive. Uh he says, "We flew up to Seattle to demo the product for Allen at his Mercer Island home. While we talked, koish 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.

12:56 Oh my god, that's an amazing story. If ever someone were perfectly set up to love to

12:56 also that completely gets at the problem that we're trying to solve. That's so 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. Uh, they they get the money, they they're like starting to build this thing. People are excited about it. Um, they wind up picking the name to over names like Bongo and Lasso. Like you can tell there's like a vibe they're going for here. My theory with to is like they they knew TV and then just like did some stuff to put an O at the end because they thought that sounded nice.

13:45 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 the making this thing super reliable is really important. Uh and I found an interviewer. He was like, well, and Windows crashed a lot. So, so they basically so they 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. alluded to this earlier, but it caused like a mini kurfuffle in the Linux world because to then didn't give its version of Linux back to the Linux world.

14:33 It had a name. Well, this was a name they people would derisively refer to That's right.

14:33 So, this is so in the weeds. No one cares about this. No, I'm actually kind of I'm curious like why why was it what does it mean to say that something is is it a corrupting or mainstreaming or mass? I I think at that time it meant like all of it, you know, like like Satan, like whatever that word needed to mean, it it meant that thing on the slashshot forms. Specifically, Linux was new at that time right?

15:00 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?

15:26 There were many new kinds of licenses were burgeoning at the time. All of this was in response to Microsoft. And so what to 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 to the application which runs on top that belongs to us.

15:26 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 it was a philosophical opposition absolutely to the the pure and uh idealistic notion that was behind open source and Linux and because I wondered whether it was also attaching it to TV which was seen as a

15:51 no it was just that to was the first to take the open source product of kind of Linux's magnitude

15:51 and remember like Linux was youngish as a project Lennis Torvald's younger in my mind he's always sort of been Gandalf but like he was younger at the time, this is a long time ago. And the idea that you would build a mass market that was sold in Best Buy and not contribute meaningfully back to

16:22 was a huge like breach of ethics or morals or whatever that community felt. and they called it toization. And there were massive questions about whether you would amend the the Linux license itself

16:22 to either prohibit or in some cases people would argue accelerate toization because you want more things to run Linux right?

16:51 And now everything is toed, right? Like that's the that's how it works. Everything runs Linux in exactly that way now.

16:51 Yeah. Like none of the like the Google Play Store on Android is not open source. I cannot overstate how much I didn't know any of this when to came out and still don't know some of it. But part of the pleasure of to when you got it at that time was you didn't have to know anything.

17:18 Like it was 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

17:18 the thing that they most correctly figured out at the very beginning was that the remote was the game, right? That like 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 like they even talked about this at the very beginning that like we 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

17:45 Is it called the peanut? Yes, it's I I I still cannot figure out if that is the official name or if that's just what everyone

18:07 I just sort of remember people calling it the peanut and and really, you know, have had a lot of remotes. That's an amazing remote.

18:07 It is. I I think I would argue it is like the greatest TV remote ever. It is. it. And it's interesting because it looks as though it has a 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.

18:33 So, is this company IDO, 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 IDO. And there there's two things on this remote that you should notice. One is the giant pause button, which to Neil's point, they like really understood, but the other is the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, which

18:57 I have mixed feelings about this, but go on. How when did where did that come from?

18:57 The very beginning. And this was like one 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 to you had to connect it to the internet. Wait, can I just play you this very brief setup clip that that describes the very this is just a chunk of the very first to setup.

19:21 You should have interviewed that guy. This is Howard Luck actually who we've we've mentioned before and he is here to teach you how to use your to. And this is the part where he explains the internet and I love it very very much.

19:21 The next step is to connect your to receiver to your phone line. Once a day, to 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 to service. To 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 to 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 to receiver.

20:13 So, this is just like in case you forgot that it's the '9s. Here you go. They had this idea like you can see in there somewhere. They're like it's it's two tech guys who had 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 we can a we can sort of update the box over time,

20:13 b we can sort of 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.

20:35 It is very notable by the way that this hardware, this setup, all of it presumed you did not have internet access,

20:35 right? That the to itself needed its own modem. It wasn't going to call over the open internet. It was gonna literally call to house wherever that was download a program guide over whatever protocol what 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.

21:01 And again like everything about to I loved this the idea that it was calling at 2 in the morning and uploading new features and getting all the shows and everything. But the the one thing I want to say about the algorithm is this is where uh so I get my to and I tell it I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then it immediately starts pouring kung fu shows onto my onto my to. This was the weird side effect of it. I felt judged by the toss 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 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 oldfashioned musicals now you're getting me. But I remember that HBO had this really sleazy realityish show called G-strings Divas which I actually liked

22:13 and I would not tell the 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 from the

22:13 for the viewer. It you needed a FinTo. Yeah, exactly. The to and this is ridiculous. I don't know who I thought cared, but I 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 to worked. So my to my TV broke at that time. My brother, apparently this runs in my family also had a to he lived uptown and so I called him and I said, "Can I have to do this TV hit for this Canadian thing where I demonstrate to my TV's broken?" 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 to and of course it's my brother's to 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

23:09 max magazine to is here made me look like like the weird no I watch Gstring divas

23:09 anyway my point my my basic point aside from telling you guys exactly what I was watching on my TV and what my brother was watching um is is just that it gave you this tremendous self-consciousness about your 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 to like and admire me and give me the things that I wanted.

23:38 It's hard for me to rewind my brain to a time when the to's great insight was it should always record everything,

23:38 but only what was available on in that time. It was like 14 hours of capacity, right?

23:38 I can do I can do this for you. Yeah, I can 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?

24:05 It's going to be bad. It's It's just It's just telling is all it is. It's Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

24:05 Oh my god. Oh, of course I should be a millionaire. I should have known that second and third most popular show.

24:05 That 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.

24:30 Uh the other ones uh this was er was huge, Friends was huge, Frrazier was huge, 60 Minutes was huge, The Practice was huge. Uh and Touched by an Angel. Shouts to Touch by an Angel.

24:30 This makes total sense. I feel like Touched by an Angel played a lot in the Pierce household.

24:30 Oh. Oh, absolutely. If we'd had a Teo, we would have had a season past to Touch by Angel.

24:30 I only know I've only gotten a few glimpses into Teenage David's life. Mhm. Touched by Angel is there 100%. Roman Denny Jr. I got you.

24:55 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 liked that were skillfully made and, you know, people had affection for for genuine reasons.

24:55 So, while all of this is happening, right, to 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-our one was $1,000.

25:17 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 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year or $200 once for lifetime service.

25:17 And that lifetime eventually became another boat anchor around and that is what I got.

25:46 You got the service. 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.

25:46 And and this is just a total side note, whether or not the lifetime meant your lifetime or the lifetime of the to box eventually becomes like an all-encompassing cont.

25:46 I was not asking questions at the time. I was like, $200 for a lifetime relationship with TBO.

25:46 A lot of people believe that that meant their life, not the life of the the box. And to was like what if you paid again and that caused a whole lot of conflict later on.

26:10 One more gadget thing that I have struggled to figure out here which is to was like 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 there was one that was considered like the to is that a fair way to say it was

26:10 the Phillips one, right? That was the video we watched was the Phillips one. Okay. So that was like the flagship box, but then there was like they had a Direct TV partnership pretty early on. They were doing stuff there. That was actually like a big win for Direct TV cuz it had the best DVR right out of the gate. The Philips one was like when people bought to it was the Philips one.

26:38 That was when you could buy in the store. And at that time, again, this is all so hard to remember the structure of this industry.

26:38 Yeah, I'm confident the younger people listening to this show, it 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 to scale there was no China, right? Like you couldn't just be like, "Drop me drop ship me 500 new products." Like, it just it did not exist.

26:58 So, you had to go to some existing big company, do a licensing deal. That company would go to the Best Buys and Compus 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're they were all just like middle-aged white dudes in those striped button-up 90s 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 to

27:27 and it all looped around CES. It all looped around CS. So if you were a company like to 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 like wildly different SKUs like wildly different products and then you would have your direct TV consumer relationship and eventually I think to takes this over right they start shipping their own hardware because they're a big enough brand a big enough company but it is

28:17 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 Phillips one was the one. Okay. It is the definitive one that everyone thinks of cuz it was the one that was in the most stores in America.

28:17 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 to why it both did and super did not work. We'll be right back. 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 to

28:47 Hey Vercast, this is Gatly out here in Seattle. And my quick to story is the story of how my dad probably one of the only times my dad was impressed with me uh when I was able to do the secret to code on the remote where you do select play select 30 select on the numpad and that would allow the fast forward button to transition into a 30 second skip button. Uh I premiered that during an episode of 24 when there was commercials going on. I put the code in and and his eyes just lit up. It was the only time he's ever been proud of me. I'm pretty sure uh that's my favorite to memory.

29:17 Emily, did that just blow your mind a little bit? It did. I I don't remember whether I knew the code. First of all, I'm a little concerned about the family dynamics there. Fair. But but be but beyond that, yeah. Um the fact that you could what how much did it skip?

29:41 30 seconds. 30 seconds, which was an amazing feeling because television had always been completely connected to uh you were just you had to watch the ads and the ads sucked and now they're back.

29:41 But for a long time they were gone like you could skip past them and I do I sort of remember some sense that the industry was panicking. I didn't care. They were

29:41 freaking out. Yeah. Like I knew that they I remember once having a conversation with someone in advertising at a party where they said they I was just talking about TBO or something and they were like why can't you just watch the ads? Oh bless your heart 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 uh 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 re-watching it or you know while you pause it and then just rewind it like just any way of skipping it seemed like an incredible miracle. So, I understand why they were upset about that. And people clearly

31:03 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.

31:03 One of the memories this brought up for me was uh 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.

31:03 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 was just like, okay, if I just leave for 18 minutes, I can just 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 I mentioned Replay TV, this other company that was doing uh 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. Uh 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 commercial.

31:52 Boy, did Anthony Wood learned that lesson. Right. To at least ostensibly didn't. and and D.VO managed to very successfully make the argument that by fast forwarding through the ad, you are still in some meaningful way seeing 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 this became a thing like obviously all the cable companies hated to one thing I thought was really interesting that I found was a bunch of the content partners decided to partner directly with to so like AOL this was like peak AOL was was a a big investor in to do some big AOL TV partnership. Again everybody's obsessed with like how do we do TV and the internet in your living room. Discovery and NBC had also invested in HEVO. Like 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,

32:46 right? Cuz they own distribution. They had monopolies, regional monopolies and distribution.

32:46 Well, and again, you can see it's like the it calls home at 2 a.m. every night. They're like, they saw what that would eventually become.

32:46 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.

33:08 And you're giving everyone so much credit. the AOL executives, the NBC executives, no one's, no one had any vision whatsoever. Saw this. I think the to guys saw this. I don't think anybody else saw this. I think the Teo guys saw it.

33:08 They were just they're they did it wrong. But I think they had 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. Well, so they ran into this problem and we're we're just talking about the first generation to the first generation to 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.

33:32 And it had its own tuners and it was in charge like it it was an end to end it was an appliance. It was it was just a complete system. It was literally pulling in the content from the airwaves or from analog cable. It was it had its own tuner. was changing the channel itself and recording it directly. Around this time, the cable companies are terrified. They are transitioning to 500 channels on digital cable systems and they're putting out their own cable boxes with encrypted signals. And you get to a place where the to work unless it's sitting on top of another cable box. And now you're in the real fight. Yes,

34:30 that fight between who's going to own the programming, who's going to target the ads, it's 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 we're sitting on top of your literally sitting on top of your hardware and disintermediating your interface, the cable companies are like, we we're going to kill you.

34:30 I remember this, but again, I remember this only in the sense that I was so desperate to maintain my relationship with D.VO 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. So, um,

34:55 when you said bizarre cards, I just got like full body PTSD. Boy, did I spend a lot of time covering the bizarre cards. Again, we we I think we're going to end up there.

34:55 And just really quick trivia question for you. How many toss do you think to 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?

35:20 I cannot guess. This is price is right. Yeah. All right. He guesses 100,000. I I I I don't know anything about how many things people sell.

35:20 48,000 to that first year. And then they sold about about a few hundred,000 a year after that. And and just to just to give away the fact that blew my mind the most, the peak number of concurrent to subscribers came in 2008.

35:51 Do either of you want to guess how many it was? I'm going to I'm going to say 500,000.

35:51 Less it was more than that. Mercifully 1.7 million. Okay. So that was that. I just added up five years of

35:51 sales. Peak TV was 1.7 million people. The few, the proud, the brightest people in the country.

35:51 We were together. We were we were linked forever. That's nuts. I would have guessed like 10 times that.

36:21 No, it's because to was a verb. Yes. It remains a verb to this day. It it the boops, the sounds and cultural consciousness.

36:21 The interface is still the thing. Yeah. Like the beautiful the green the little the the the curved little ways in which they showed things. The the logo where was the dancing with the feet and the antenna?

36:21 Can I play you a little intro thing they have from this is from 1999. This is It says introducing the new face of television and it's just a little to animation.

36:50 It's just a bunch of little balls. Oh my god. It's the beginning of the morning show.

36:50 There's the little to guy. That was it. It's just there's a little to guy. A bunch of this stuff is is all sort of tied up in one thing that to very early on which was give to everybody. like the there were there anyone who was anyone in Hollywood was given a to by to they they estimated giving thousands upon thousands of them away.

36:50 That's very smart and it should have worked well. So in in a in a certain way it really did like I think the fact became to

37:22 like the fact that people still talk about to 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 toy cultural moments. Here's one from Sex in the City. And just to set up this clip, I believe it's Miranda has a to that she is in like a deep and loving relationship with. And she comes home to find that uh all of her stuff has been deleted, which is like at this particular moment like a true shared cultural nightmare.

37:52 You sat on to Is it okay? This is a very funny. Nothing is recorded. How could you do this? This is Jules and Mimi the morning after. No, no, no, no, no.

37:52 This what came up in this research so many times is the like relationship people had with the list of titles in their library, right? And it's like you would set up your season passes to record shows as they came out and you would like guard a few of your favorite episodes of your favorite shows like with your life

38:28 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 no matter and you really had to like inform the

38:28 it would kind of do a like first in last out thing, right? It would just it would 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. This was this 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 3 episode of Sex in the City."

38:51 This is exactly the same impulse as curating your iPod. Yes. Right. This is this moment in media where it's still not everything. It's still 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.

39:17 What's on your to is also an expression of like your personality. Whereas what's on your Netflix means nothing.

39:17 Well, over time starts to do this really fun stuff where like there was a whole section of the to website that was just what was on celebrities now playing lists. And this is like a way to get to know people.

39:43 But this is so crazy to me. I think I remember when that came out cuz I was like they stole my idea because when to first started one of the first thoughts that I had about it was I thought I would like to watch what Michael Stip is watching you know like just I wished I 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 um a public view of somebody else's TV watching I 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

40:10 kicks your TV on the second. It's only Michael. It's only Michael St. But anyway, so that is how people who have to feel about to right. Like I think this stuff is like not totally dissimilar from what it was like to be Emily Newsbomb in in your home media environment watching

40:36 to I really felt like I 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 that turns into a whole thing. But like 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 was to was an extra expense, an extra subscription, and like famously kind of difficult to get up and running.

41:04 Okay. It was an extra subscription unless you had a lifetime membership. Well, sure, but that's another I mean, that's that's $400. I don't have

41:04 I'm just telling you why I did not drop it for a DVR. Yeah. Um, but anyway, it's your lifetime.

41:30 However long. So to had they like built a lot like 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

41:30 they had one, the important one was the time warp patent that we can pause and fast forward.

41:30 And so, and they just went to war with everybody who did this, and wound up winning. Uh, 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 to from like an innovative hardware company into a patent troll. like it essentially became a patrol and this is where like we have like baby blogger Neili Patel in 2009

41:55 writing essentially why hasn't to done anything interesting in a decade and the answer is because it became a patent

42:19 patentrol it it it spent all of its money litigating what it had done in 1999 rather than making anything else

42:19 let's rewrite history and figure out how to could have saved itself is there something I'm just like you just want the sound yeah 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 like technology uh 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 a fancy showoff thing something that everybody had in their living room and all the stuff that was shown on it changed. So could to have

42:49 one alternate history I think is really interesting is there was a faction inside of to that wanted them to start licensing the software for almost nothing from the very beginning and basically try to be Windows or 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 to sticker on their shitty thing which solved nothing but it made to 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 if we can be the ones who win at software that makes us powerful right

43:36 and I think there's that that's a really interesting other outcome here that is like if to have become the like ubiquitous layer under all of this what like Roku and Fire TV are now and like even to relatively early to the idea that like oh we should actually incorporate all these streaming services it was too late to it to say to 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 it's just not

44:03 the industry has not allowed it but like if to had made itself the software layer underneath televisions everywhere instead of for 1.7 million people

44:03 so is that the equivalent of like when AOL sent out all the DVDs and like all the

44:03 I was going to say the other thing is send out movies by DVD and just eat Netflix alive like that's the way

44:03 it's it's nice that people think that to could have done this to could Never never done these things. I'm going to say something nice about cable companies.

44:29 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 to like architected where the stuff was.

44:29 Right? So to idea at scale, let's say they 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.

44:57 Yeah, this is stupid. Like it's 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 list 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, right? 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

45:23 like on demand stream. When and then to started filing all its patent lawsuits, the way the companies got around this is by saying, "Okay, fine. But 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.

45:43 Yeah. And to 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 the thing that they 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?

46:32 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 to in 2010, they were so confused about what it was people wanted. They're like, "We've done it, everybody. We've rebuilt all of finally did it. It runs Adobe Flash." And the consumers ever were like, "Yeah, we nobody wants that shit." Like the stuff that plays the video games on the web. No, thank you. We we want Netflix. We want like Roku,

47:03 right? And they quickly like immediately lost the war because the the product was architected for a moment in time and to didn't grow with that m. 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 we've essentially reached the end of the to story. The actual end of the to story is it sells to a company called ROI for $1.1 billion and goes from being a patent troll to a larger patent troll. Uh and that is essentially the current state of TO. 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 we're just going to end before we get to the version history questions with I have a question for you. I found a story from 2019 2000 the year of our Lord 2019 that suggested you still had a working to in your house that you still used.

48:03 Um it it it seems it seems likely because um 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 Sephinwall where I was like trying to figure out what I should get because this was clearly untenable. But yeah, I guess I still did. I mean I 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

48:29 the first time we met I remember being like I should help her. But the thing is I was try I 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 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 so I don't have like the hugest screen and my to worked, so I just used it. But yes, I I stand by my insane loyalty to to this. I love it for you. All right, we need to take one more break and then we're going to come back do the version history questions. We'll be right back.

49:18 All right, we're back. As always, it is time for the eight version history questions. Question number one is, where does 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. A fact that we just completely ripped off for this segment.

49:18 It's okay. You guys are not the first people. 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

49:46 was clearly the right idea at the wrong time or No, I think you could make an argument it was the right idea at the right time for all the things you were just saying, El Ni. Like

49:46 I I'm saying it's the middle of the box. It was absolutely the right idea, but it was not the right idea.

49:46 You think it goes right here? It met its moment. It did. I agree. Right. We should be able to pause TV. We can here's the technology. We can actually build it. It's gonna 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.

50:07 You will become nothing. I like that you use dust to dust the little to alien with its little TV antennas.

50:07 I've always found that mascot just like slightly ominous. It It is ominous, but I like it.

50:33 It's like It's got dead eyes. It's a little bit like the last thing you see before you die kind of vibes.

50:33 So, are the eyes the I and the O? It's unclear. I It I've always just looked at that and been like, "That thing's dead inside." Like, that's just what I've got.

50:33 I guess I'm drawn to things that are dead inside. Do you agree with this assertion?

50:33 It it I mean, very hard. It's hard. It's so It's just one of those things where by definition, it's at the 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.

50:57 Excellent. All right. Question number two. Was to peak anything? To is peak to do you know what I mean?

50:57 No. Like you can't 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 to was peak no nei peak nei all day every day.

51:21 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 to was I'm not 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

51:49 what would that what do you call this era right the very late 90s into let's say 2004 whatever that thing

51:49 pre-social networking and and at a point, you know, like why don't you call it that sound that made when you when you uh uh 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.

52:19 I have a couple I would like to offer you. I think to was peak TV remote, and I don't think it's close.

52:19 Yeah, that's good. Oh, the perfect TV remote. Yeah, I don't think I don't think remotes have ever been as good before.

52:19 100% agree. I did find an old and gadget post by you and El Nei that was like, "This remote's fine, but I want the one with the full slide out certy keyboard."

52:19 The one I was like, I don't I don't think you understand. We'll make sure there's an insert of my to remote collection and including the one where this part, the top slides up and it reveals a cordy keyboard.

52:39 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 to sound like it go All this is horrible, but the remote itself was delight.

52:39 The one other one I would like to offer you is peak TV sound effects. And just to just to jog your memory, I would like to play you an 11second video on YouTube of all of the to sound effects.

53:15 Yeah, it's good stuff. See, this is for me ASMR. This is my Oh, that bonk. The bonk.

53:15 The bonk was terrible, actually. Like, it's good, but it hurts. It causes pain. Yeah, it's dissonant.

53:15 Can I tell you a fun story about these sounds? So, these sounds were based they their like inspiration was the the three note sound from the NBC Sonic logo. Yeah. Uh they were like, "We want something that is like that iconic." Um and they hired this guy Ed Allard to do it. Ed is like a gaming industry legend. Uh he helped make games like Plants Versus Zombies and Bejeweled. Wow. Like huge guy. His brother is Jay Allard who led the Xbox 360 project at Microsoft that 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

53:43 he's just at home with a Mima being like bonk literally. Yeah. Uh yeah. So kudos to 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?

54:09 I mean, clearly not. Maybe. I think you Neili did make a pretty compelling case that like it had its moment and that it that was it.

54:09 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 to 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 sounds. 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

54:32 until there are no taxis until taxis are gone. Yeah. And then we will raise the rates to astronomical levels.

54:32 Question number four. Uh, will the youth ever make it cool again? Are we headed towards a to retro nostalgia movement?

54:57 Well, I I have a 17-year-old son. All of their his friends are extremely into old technology in such a funny way to me. like they're into uh playing vinyl albums and they're into they buy each other as presents, small old-fashioned cameras and things like that, but I don't see how to be in that category. You can't use it. It's not like what are you going to turn it into a planter? like it's not

54:57 I do think like the the spirit of it cuz like as you've been talking about all this stuff about you know 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 to

55:24 that's the thing is I I absolutely you know 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. To have that quality, I can understand using a bunch of beautiful to remote controls around your house as some sort of, I don't know, decorative device, but I don't see how

55:48 as I've done. Yeah, it's a very low W. I can imagine. Um, all right. What feature of to you take and apply on every current TV streaming device? What can we lift off of to stick onto your Roku that would make you happier?

56:15 Search. Yeah. You just want to be able to search and it would just tell you anything that was available. That's I mean you can sort of

56:15 they called 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.

56:15 I literally forgot to cool this was. Yeah. Oh yeah. It was it it's like an explore system that really doesn't exist.

56:42 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

56:42 well you know because they were in control of their own program guide. Yeah. Right. So they were 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.

57:03 It's still it's not great. Apple search hilariously nerfed by Netflix which doesn't want to participate like and then all those databases are not built for any single search engine. You would think with like all the AI that we have now.

57:03 It's just the most natural thing for you to want to do. And also the to one was very welcoming in that you know you would search for one thing and you could see the names of various different other actors. It would sort of remind you you know I like Steve Carell. like so and so. Oh, I wonder what he's done. Like, you know, it it actually led to that kind of internet rabbit hole behavior before the internet really had the capacity to do a lot of that. Um, 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 Marriott somewhere and you can have your nostalgia for TV guide. It'll be fine.

57:50 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 to this is easy. The answer is yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Criteria question number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? I mean, I think it was remarkably good.

58:16 That's an easy one for its moment. It was okay. I think I think that's right. This is actually

58:16 until it became a devastating patent troll. Forgot to innovate for a decade. That is true. I think we're at like we're at like 1999 to

58:16 Okay. Not the later one that I reviewed in 2010 that ran Flash. Not the 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 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?

58:41 Yes. Can I show you my evidence of lasting impact? This is might be the single best story. The single most important investigative journalism I've ever done on The Verge.com.

58:41 Oh lord. Okay. It's a story I read during Donald Trump's first term. Here's the the headline. Does Trump have a state-of-the-art supero or just direct TV? Because he ran around he I think he still runs around saying the White House has a state-of-the-art super and the whole press corps at the White House just ran with it.

59:04 Yeah. I I remember him saying this all the time. What constitutes a super to? I don't know. But I was like, "Hey guys, can anyone ask him one question about what a state-of-the-art super too is?" And then finally he does an interview with Leslie Stall on 60 Minutes and there's a brief shot of a remote on the table

59:35 and I was like, "Oh, there it is. This is Neil. You zoom in and it is a $4 Direct TV remote

59:35 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

59:35 well that just shows blasting the word to it. 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 Direct TV 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 to Super, 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, I this is all you need to know. There it is.

1:00:36 Emily, what do you think? Lasting impact. I mean, on you certainly. Yes. Easy win.

1:00:36 I mean, yeah. I 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. Um because what it changed was my expectations of what I could get like that t that that I could get um 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 uh 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.

1:01:36 All right, done. Teo, welcome to the Version History Hall of Fame. Oh, absolutely. It feels right. This is like it would have been wrong if it didn't belong in there. It's to All right, we are done here. Thank you both for doing this. This is incredibly fun. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. Come back next time.

1:01:36 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.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "How TiVo changed TV forever | Version History"?

In order: 0:00 Silicon Graphics, Time Warner Cable, Emily Newsbomb, Neal Patel; 10:00 Paul Allen, Replay TV; 20:00 Direct TV; 30:00 Replay TV, Sex in the City; 40:00 Emily Newsbomb, Replay TV; 50:00 Direct TV; 1:00:00 Direct TV.

What is mentioned in this The Verge episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Tivo, Direct TV, Replay TV, Silicon Graphics, Roku, Emily Newsbomb. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How TiVo changed TV forever | Version History"?

The episode runs 1 h 2 min; the transcript is about 13,468 words in 218 timestamped sections.

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