TiVo DVRIP

TiVo DVRIP

Dearly Beloved and those who got in 
cuz no one was watching the door: Time moves forward. It is a never ending, never 
stopping flow and we swim against it or with it depending on our vibe. That is the promise 
of existence. For centuries, you humans were unable to stop this momentum though you tried 
with photos and Super 8 hand held cameras, from film to digital, creating frozen memories 
in albums you’ll never look at again until you have to move and wonder what “all this shit is” 
when you find a box under the bed, all the way back to when you carved shapes on the walls of 
your caves. Not going quietly into that goodnight but raging against the dying of the light, as 
Dylan Thomas once wrote, he himself recording a thought on to a page forever to be remembered, 
a save-point in the game of life. And still, humanity, you continue swimming on, making sure 
to save where you can, easier now with phones, perhaps too easy cuz you’re filming your food. 
Who wants that? Like I get filming something truly incredible like a cake that looks like a burger or 
a shrimp po-boy the size of a football or one of those bloody mary’s you get in like Milwaukee that 
has a whole-ass Chilis 3 For Me deal on a skewer in it, the jalapeno poppers looking like crab 
fisherman from Deadliest Catch bobbing dangerously in its red waters, holding fast. Like I get that. 
But usually it’s just an egg passed out on some hashbrowns and glinty bacon on your instagram and 
that’s not art. It’s just brunch, Tiffany. But it is in honor of the endless pursuit of stopping, 
rewinding, rewatching and pausing time that we gather today as we mourn in remembrance 
of the TiVo DVR. Please bow your heads. Oh lord, or whatever’s watching us and laughing 
at us taking pics of our food: Twas January in the year of your god, 1997: whence Jim Barton and Mike 
Ramsey, two former employees of Hewlett Packard and Silicon Graphics SGI (ask your dad), announced 
at the Consumer Electronics Show that the first version of their latest creation would be released 
at the end of Q1 of 1999, which is March 31st, which would be a blue moon, hence the reason 
engineering staff code-named the first version “Blue Moon”. The TiVo DVR: Originally designed 
as a home network device (back in those days, the Before Times, The First Age, you didn’t 
run in the living room cuz you’d trip over the modem cord and knock out your dad’s life’s 
work which was probably Ultima Online) eventually they redesigned it to be a device that can 
record digitized video onto a hardrive. “Someone 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 the bathroom.’ 
And I realized: I know how to do that!” says Jim Barton. A simple want that would 
restitch the very fabric of time itself. When TiVo first began its life, it had a modest 
maximum storage capacity of 14 hours, not nearly enough for the entire run of Supernatural or 
Grey’s Anatomy (long may it reign) and it sold for $499, a simple price for the Lovecraftian power 
of recording, storing, rewinding Time itself. Each TiVo came with it’s iconic peanut-shaped 
remote: Comfortable, ergonomic and easier to use than whatever unholy bullshit universal 
remote you got from Best Buy with buttons and features you needed an engineering degree to 
decipher. You would pay a one-time fee of $199 for a lifetime subscription or subscribe to the 
TiVo service for $9.95 per month or $99 a year, netting subscribers access to a networked 
service that included a guide and a “Wish List” that allowed viewers to set their TiVos to record 
things in advance so you never missed a game, what Mulder and Scully were getting into, those crazy 
Sopranos kids that were new on the block, the system literally changing the world of watching 
Golf cuz back then you’d have to get up at like 2am to watch a Championship. So influential was 
the DVR to golf that David Eger was able to catch Tiger Woods erring during the 2013 Masters leading 
to one of the most controversial rulings in modern golf, double cheeseburger mcleading to the 2017 
ruling that fans were no longer allowed to call in rules violations from their home and that 
is all the golf we shall be discussing today because I care about you and we are in mourning. 
But it was in 2004 that TiVo badooped its way into golden legend, during the Superbowl halftime show 
when Justin Timberlake accidentally turned on one of Janet Jackson’s high beams to the world, in a 
wardrobe malfunction still sung of in taverns and halls to this day. Nipplegate set the record for 
most watched and replayed moment in TiVo history. Gone were the days of furiously setting a VCR 
(which left this plane of existence in 2016, long may its memory live) in order 
to just hope to catch a something, an anything, a moment whilst you slept, praying 
you remembered the time change, the time zone, the time itself, all hopes resting on that 
little Phillips Maganovox hero to get that show, tape that moment for you to have to fast forward 
through the commercials to get to the point, a feature famously later exploited and perfected 
by the TiVo Skipmode: moving forward past the ads with the touch of a button. Doc Brown could 
never Marty McFly through Time like that. Back to the Future, where now we are, the Cord 
Cutter Movement, as in cutting the cord of cable in favor of streaming services, has led to the 
decline of the TiVo. The need to trawl the sea of Live television becoming ancient history, making 
way for the now, right now, whenever you want it, Netflixing and chilling the sales of the TiVo 
until Oct 1st 2025 when it was announced that it has ended its sales of physical DVR hardware 
and accessories. “We are very proud of the TiVo DVR legacy,” a company spokesman told the Wall 
Street Journal and this is what and why we are drinking to right now probably, I mean there’s 
like A LOT going on but in this moment, frozen in whatever you’re filming me with right now (don’t 
forget to tag me, please like and subscribe) we raise our drinks to the memory of the TiVo DVR, 
it’s time begin done, only to be remembered in references in episodes of How I Met Your Mother 
and Sex and the City. It’s name became a verb, to TiVo was to record the moment, to hold on to a 
memory, to remember. And here we are now to TiVo the TiVo. Also people were still actively buying 
lifetime memberships which means eventually you’re gonna have to watch it fade away in real time, 
one last badoop, the lasting memory fading away, chasing the VCR’s clock blinking 12 
into the darkness of the Used to Be. Humans, youmans, dearly beloved: Time moves 
forward, in a never stopping flow and we swim against it or with it depending on our vibe 
until we are but shells caught in its wake, leaving behind only crunchy things for whatever 
comes next to step on and go “Ah, dafuq?!” A reminder of what was to those that come after. And 
so on. And so on. But TiVo DVRs were able to pause that time and for the first time a generation knew 
what it was to be God. To look upon this silly series of events called Existence and laugh cuz 
time meant nothing! Commercials shalt be skipped! Plot points be revisited cuz someone wouldn’t stop 
asking what the hell was goin on cuz they didn’t watch previous episodes before! Moments frozen as 
if by sorcery while you got up to pee, humanity experiencing the mundane and infinite practice 
of a cosmic deity! Life but a moving wheel to be stopped on a whim cuz you drank too much 
celestial Mountain Dew! Humans raise your heads! For a warrior is racing toward the infinite, 
free of its cords and dusty place on the media center! A lord! The Duke of Time! All powerful 
and true is racing towards the ultimate glory, smiling for it always knew the power, the answer 
to the mystery of the cosmos! HEAR ME AND TREMBLE YE HEAVENS! FOR A LEGEND IS COMING TO SHAKE YOUR 
VERY HALLS! AND TO THEE, YE MORTALS, YE FRAIL CORPOREAL FUGACIOUS SOULS, REMEMBER ITS NAME FOR 
WE ARE ALL TIVOS IN OUR OWN WAY, HOLDING STASHING MEMORIES OF OUR TIME IN LIFE’S UNCARING WAVES! SO 
HOLD! HOLD SAYS I, IN TIVOS NAME! HOLD AND RECORD YOUR MEMORIES OF THE SERIES THAT IS YOUR LIVES FOR 
THE UNIVERSE WILL NOT AND REPLAY THEM! OH, REWIND AND REPLAY AS LONG AS YOUR BRAINS STILL FIRE AND 
REMEMBER, REWATCH, LIVING NOT TV BUT LIFE, YOUR WAY! GO NOT GENTLE INTO THE NIGHT, RAGE! RAGE SAYS 
I, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE ACTIVITY LIGHT! In the name of the Dish, Direct TV and 
Tablo we pray: May your ads be skipped, your wish lists be honored and may we all be 
saved and never accidentally deleted. Amen.

In which we say badoop to a legend and one of the DVReal ones.

For reference:
https://www.thefriedegg.com/articles/tivo-recording-golf-history-tiger-woods-lexi-thompson

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