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January/February 2007 | VOLUME 118, NO. 1

WHAT:Digital Video Recorders
WHO:TiVo Inc.

Play it again, tomorrow

Randi Schmelzer

Worst way to make stars out of talentless angry drunks or spoiled hotel heiresses: Reality TV
Though cinéma vérité has been around since the 1950s, reality TV as we know it is often traced to Cops, a FOX series that first aired
in 1989 and followed police officers on the
job, pioneering the “camcorder look”
on mainstream TV.
Cops is now in its 19th season, and reality
TV has spread to
the far reaches of the cable (and Internet) spectrum. Television
may never recover.

IMPACT: In the late '90s, Silicon Valley-based TiVo pioneered digital video recorders—TV devices that allow viewers to record programs on an internal hard disk. Because viewers can "pause" live TV, "rewind" just-viewed footage, and entirely skip over annoying commercials, the technology terrified the advertising industry when it was first introduced, creating a "death-of-the-30-second-spot" hysteria that lasted for years. It also forced radical thinking in how commerce communicates to the rest of us. The stampede of marketing money now pouring into social networking, cell phones, and the like is a direct descendant of TiVo’s challenge to the media status quo. "DVRs slapped marketers between the eyes," says Paul Rand, global chief development and innovation officer at Ketchum Communications. "They underlined the fact that how you reached consumers was changing." Now a "how-did-we-ever-live-without-it?" staple in more than 12 million American homes, TiVo has achieved the ultimate in American pop culture: It has become a verb, as in "I'll TiVo Heroes and watch it over the weekend."

play it again, tomorrow
Copyright TiVo Inc. (TiVo Logo)