I still don’t think we’ve beaten TiVo
If you never had an actual legit original TiVo (not a generic DVR, or whatever TiVo is today), you probably missed out on the best TV watching experience that's ever been created.
- Logan, from Veronica Mars. The sarcasm is even more effective now.
Forget about the horror of live TV and how a TiVo actually worked (it recorded shows from live TV, how weird) here’re the two UX things that TiVo did amazingly well for TV consumption:
- It put all the unwatched episodes of every show you were watching in one place.
- It picked out shows it thought you would like and put a bunch of those in another place.
You’d turn on your TV and have a simple list of all the shows you haven’t watched yet, with folders if there were multiple unwatched episodes. Then if you ran out, you could check out the suggestions. Look at the main interface. This is everything you need:
It also had just the right amount of personality. That little TV mascot thing in the corner was animated. The sounds were oddly satisfying. And the UI theme was vibrant, yet simple. (For the early 2000s, this was top-shelf design.)
It's 20+ years later, and no one has managed to replicate the simplicity and fun of TiVo.
Sure, Netflix tried to be THE place with EVERYTHING on-demand, which would obviously be better than TiVo’s attempt had it have worked. And there were a couple years when it was new that Netflix got close-ish to having enough content to be your only place to go to watch stuff. Now, though ... it’s a mile away.
There are other apps now like Apple TV that try to connect to other streaming apps and aggregate what you’re watching, but they never come close to connecting to every streaming service. Even if they do to your services, it doesn’t work all that well. Amazon and Plex and Apple TV and a bunch of others have ‘channels’. You can subscribe to Apple TV inside Amazon Prime, for example, and try to keep it all together that way.
No matter what you do though it's still a mess.
TiVo was a stop-gap technology. It existed (in its original form) only during the transition from live tv to streaming. But streaming now has its own litany of problems. Perhaps what we need is a new TiVo to bridge the gap between a-bunch-of-bullshit-streaming-apps and whatever way this problem eventually gets fixed.
A new TiVo-like-machine could use your streaming services for you when you're not around, watch the shows, record them, and put them all in one place. You’d use the new TiVo interface to search for and select shows, and it would also record the first couple eps of shows it thought you might like. You’d never have to open a streaming app again.
There’s probably some legal reason or DRM stopping this from working but if you want to make very little money and give it all to lawyers, this could be the business for you.