TiVo Has Officially Discontinued Its DVRs

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It’s the end of an era: TiVo no longer makes or sells the DVRs that made the company famous. If you still have one, the company will continue to support it, but don’t look for one: TiVo as we know it is effectively finished.

TiVo, however, did not make much of this shutdown. It turns out that Luke Bouma of Cord Cutter News was the first to spot the development. Earlier this month, Bouma reported that TiVo Corporation had silently discontinued its DVR line, removing all references to the devices on its website. Following Bouma’s reporting, TiVo parent company Xperi confirmed the news.

In a statement to PCMag, an Xperi spokesperson said: “I can confirm that as of [Oct.] On January 1, 2025, TiVo stopped selling physical DVR products, including hardware and accessories, both online and through agents…TiVo no longer manufactures hardware and our remaining inventory is now sold out, although we will continue to offer product support in the future.

TiVo hasn’t completely disappeared. The brand is now developing both TiVo OS, an operating system for smart TVs similar to Roku OS or Fire OS, as well as DTS AutoStage Video Service, an entertainment service developed for cars. But it’s no longer a DVR manufacturer or seller, which might shock a time traveler from the early 2000s.

The TiVo effect

Technology comes and goes, but if you didn’t watch TV in the late ’90s and early 2000s, you might not know how monumental TiVo was. The company released its first DVRs in 1999 and introduced to the market features such as simple one-touch recording, a hard drive for saving multiple recordings at once and, perhaps most notably, the ability to “pause” live television and fast-forward through commercials. The DVR offered viewers much more than just a VCR, which only allowed linear recording on single cassettes. TiVo could record live video from any input, including analog, cable, or satellite, which gave users flexibility in the content they recorded.

Before TiVo, if you missed the start of a show, you just had to deal with it and try to step in as best you could, assuming you didn’t have a VCR set up to record it, of course. If you had a TiVo, however, you could simply go back to the start of the program and, when you reached a commercial break, rewind to the show until you caught up with the live broadcast.

TiVo has changed the way consumers watch TV, and we’re likely seeing the consequences today. The market adapted and cable companies began offering their own DVRs with cloud recording instead of hard drive recording. Streaming services built on this dynamic: viewers were already getting used to watching shows when it was convenient for them, so why not get ahead of the game and offer all shows on demand at all times? No need to choose which programs to record: everything is available at any time.

Like other tech pioneers who have fallen behind over time, TiVo has struggled to navigate the streaming era it arguably helped create. The company hasn’t released a DVR since 2019, when it launched the TiVo Edge. This DVR supported modern features, such as 4K Dolby Vision HDR, Dolby Atmos sound, and access to major streaming apps, in addition to recording live TV. It then tried to break into the streaming device market with the TiVo Stream 4K, but the competition was too fierce to make an impact.

Ironically, as TiVo abandons its DVRs, streaming services are increasingly turning to ad-supported plans. TiVo was a game changer by allowing us to skip ads, and streaming initially omitted ads altogether. But more and more customers are willing to pay less to see ads. We’ve kind of come full circle.

TiVo’s days may be over, but its impact endures. What Skype did for video calls, TiVo did for television. I’ll think about that next time I start something to watch on Netflix or Hulu.