TiVo won the court battles, but lost the TV war

In the 2000s, TiVo reached heights that few companies have ever reached. Like Google and Xerox, its name has become a verb. People had to “TiVo” the new episode of Battlestar Galactica or Red Sox Game 4 against the Cardinals, don’t “record” it. Although it didn’t invent the DVR, TiVo popularized it and many features we would come to take for granted, like the ability to pause or rewind live TV and watch one program while recording another.

These features were covered by the now infamous US Patent 6,233,389, better known as the Time Warp patent. TiVo spent much of the 2000s and early 2010s defending its intellectual property through a series of high-profile lawsuits, most notably against EchoStar. This particular saga lasted nearly a decade, with TiVo initially filing a lawsuit in January 2004 and the final $500 million settlement being awarded in April 2011.

But TiVo spent much of its glory years in legal battles with major players in the television and digital video industry. Motorola, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Dish Network, Cisco and Verizon all found themselves victims of a patent infringement lawsuit filed by TiVo. TiVo emerged victorious in almost every case. The US Patent Office even agreed to re-examine the patent twice and reaffirmed its claims.

Licensing its technology became the primary way TiVo made money as it entered the 2010s. The problem was, by then the writing was on the wall. Netflix launched its streaming service in January 2007. Hulu entered beta later that year and launched publicly in March 2008. That year also marked the launch of Roku’s first device and the first modern smart TV models, like the Samsung PAVV Bordeaux TV 750.

DVRs have become standard issue with most cable TV packages. Of course, TiVo’s interface was sleeker and had advanced features, such as scheduling recordings remotely through TiVo Central Online or transferring them to a computer with TiVoToGo. But spending $200 or more for a separate DVR in 2008 (at least if you wanted HD tuners), plus an additional subscription cost on top of your cable bill, was an increasingly tough sell when Time Warner offered you a pretty good DVR.

Roku offered simple-to-use streaming set-top boxes at impulse purchase prices – as low as $49.99 in 2011. Google pushed prices even lower with the Chromecast in 2013. Smart TV operating systems were becoming more and more capable. TiVo was adding support for Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services, but it seemed to constantly be playing catch-up as the new decade approached.

TiVo’s hardware had stagnated. We were wasting time on features like the ability to order Domino’s from your TV. And its main money maker – a patent focused on television manipulation – was becoming increasingly obsolete as cord cutting began to gain popularity.

Traditional pay TV subscriptions peaked in the United States in 2010 at about 103 million, or about 89 percent of households, according to nScreenMedia. By 2025, this figure has fallen to just 49.6 million, or 37.6% of households. The most popular streaming services now easily overtake linear pay TV as they copy some of its moves by relying on live content anchored by sports and other spectacles that draw eyeballs to now-indispensable commercials. At the end of 2024, Netflix had 89.6 million subscribers and Disney Plus 56.8 million in the United States and Canada. (The companies report subscriptions by region only, not by country.) As TiVo continued to fight companies like Google and Time Warner in court, its customer base dried up.

TiVo was eventually purchased by Rovi, a company whose main business is accumulating patents and licensing them to other companies or suing companies to force them to license their technology. Unfortunately, this was to be TiVo’s fate in the future. When it was purchased by technology licensing company Xperi in 2020, the press release announcing the merger didn’t tout best-in-class hardware or innovative set-top box software. Instead, it boasted that it had “one of the largest and most diverse intellectual property (IP) licensing platforms in the industry.”

After its merger with Xperi, TiVo did not want to launch another set-top box. Its last model, the TiVo Edge, was released in 2019. And this month, the company confirmed that it had quietly sold the last of its inventory on September 30 and would be exiting the hardware business.

TiVo says it plans to focus on its all-new smart TV operating system, a move that likely comes 15 years too late. Perhaps if the company had focused on revenue streams outside of the courtroom, it could have been at the forefront of smart TV deployment. Perhaps it could have developed its own streaming device that was more than a lazy (and late) reskin of Android TV. TiVo’s user interface and iconic Peanut remote control were popular. His brand was known. But rather than building a platform to power the next generation of TVs, it seemed focused on extracting every dollar from companies that were clearly headed toward obsolescence.