All Apple All Day

If you haven't read the two  prior   posts in this series, here's the quick summary: For a long time, TiVo was the "luxury brand" DVR. Sure, it cost more, and you could go with the cable company's DVR service - but their interface was terrible and their boxes were ugly. And TiVo was selling the beautiful Series 3. It cost more, but it was worth it. A DVR to be envied.  Then, everything changed.

This is the hardest post for a TiVo fan like me to write.  TiVo was never a market share leader in the DVR space - at least not after the cable companies started offering their own barebones DVR service.  But they were a thought leader, and a features leader , and the competition wasn't close.  For consumers, the choice was clear - pay your cable company to rent a lousy UI and basic, ugly DVR, or pay a little bit more to buy an elegant, cutting edge solution from TiVo.  And then that status quo completely fell apart. 

It's hard to write this post. I've been working on it, off and on, for quite a while. You see, I'm an unabashed TiVo fanboy. For about a decade, we bought almost every box TiVo ever produced. We owned their stock. We even picked up TiVos for our parents. We were TiVo evangelists. And for the first time in 12 years, there isn't a single piece of TiVo hardware in our house. How did this happen? Well, gradually, and then suddenly.