Barton aptly describes the major technical and business decisions that led to TiVo’s system. That system’s servers and customer premises hardware and software created the digital video recorder or personal video recorder industry. The resulting ability to skip commercials is shaking up the business model of the entire television broadcast industry.

The success of TiVo’s system relied on design decisions that made the most of enormous decreases in the costs of chips that compress and decompress digital video, hard drives that store large volumes of compressed video, networks that can supply program guide information, and open source software on which a reliable and effective application could be built. The key business decision, a subscription model, was necessary to subsidize the high cost of the early hardware and to cover the ongoing costs of maintaining servers and purchasing program guide content.

Other design decisions were driven by the necessity of convincing TiVo’s end users that they were operating a simple and familiar television set rather than a daunting computer. Simplicity was particularly hard to achieve in an environment of unreliable delivery of power and information. Other design decisions involved protecting users’ privacy, including the number of times they replayed particular wardrobe malfunctions, and protecting program suppliers’ valuable content against new opportunities for theft.

As a long-time user of a competitor’s system, I would like to know how the decisions made for TiVo compared to those made for Replay-TV, Scientific Atlanta, and perhaps other implementations of the digital video recorder concept.