TiVo
The machine that finally bent television around your schedule instead of the other way around. Pause live TV, rewind the play you just missed, record a whole season by name — no tapes, no timers. "TiVo it" became a living-room verb.
Founded by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay, the company started life as Teleworld before renaming itself TiVo Inc. The first TiVo DVR shipped March 31, 1999 — a date the engineers nicknamed "Blue Moon" because it coincided with an actual blue moon. What it did felt genuinely revolutionary: you could pause live television, rewind and replay up to 30 minutes of what you'd just watched, and — with Season Pass — record every new episode of a series automatically, by name, with no VCR tapes and no timer programming. TiVo Suggestions even recorded things it guessed you'd like.
"TiVo it" became the living-room verb for recording anything, and subscribers peaked at 4.36 million in January 2006. Then the cable companies built DVRs into their own set-top boxes, and the function TiVo invented became a checkbox feature of everyone's cable subscription. By January 2012 TiVo was down to about 2.3 million US subscribers.
But the vocabulary stuck. Years after most households had moved on to generic DVRs and then streaming, people still said "TiVo it." The little box with the smiling-TV logo had done the rarest thing a gadget can do: it entered the language and stayed there.
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