Bloop! Bloop! The rise and fall of TiVo
“When you're going through hell, keep going." This podcast is about failure and how it breeds success. Every week, we talk to remarkable people who have accomplished great things but have also faced failure along the way. By exploring their experiences, we can learn how to build, succeed, and stay humble. We are actively looking for sponsors. If you’d like to reach over 200,000 readers monthly, Keep Going is the perfect opportunity. Check out our one-pager here. If you’d like to appear on either show, email john@biggs.cc.
Bloop! Bloop! You remember the sound. It was a cross between a bubble popping and a robot burping, a noise that meant you were about to watch The Daily Show, even if it had aired the night before. It wasn’t live, but it didn’t matter. You had a TiVo. Today, that seems almost ordinary. Every streaming service remembers where you stopped watching. Every phone can record video. Every television comes with apps. But in 1999, TiVo felt like science fiction. Before TiVo, television followed a schedule. If your favourite show aired at 9 p.m., you were in front of the television at 9 p.m. If you missed it, you hoped for a rerun. Some people programmed VCRs, but most people remember that experience as a collection of blinking clocks, confusing menus, and tapes that somehow always ended before the final scene. You knew that time mattered, and if there were commercials, you had to sit through them or go grab a sandwich. I still remember the terrible days before TiVo. We would watch prestige TV — Grey’s Anatomy or The Sopranos — and have to sit still. Nobody was on their phone. Nobody was half watching, half browsing TikTok. Hell, TikTok didn’t exist. Instead, you were glued to the set at a set time and didn’t get to leave until the show was over. It was torture. TiVo changed that relationship completely. Television stopped being something broadcasters controlled and became something you controlled. The box, devoid of buttons, sat quietly beneath your television, recording hours of programming onto a hard drive. You could pause live television, rewind a scene you had just missed, or skip commercials with a few taps of the remote. Those features sound ordinary now because they became the standard. At the time, they felt almost magical. You had a collection of shows you could keep forever. There was that one episode of Friends you liked. Or that documentary that you were going to pop back into. It was right there, waiting on a spinning hard drive. TiVo also did something even more interesting. It learned what you liked. If you watched enough documentaries or late-night comedy, it would quietly record similar programmes it thought you might enjoy. Long before Spotify playlists and Netflix recommendations, TiVo was already trying to answer a simple question: “What should I watch next?” The TiVo knew. But how? The TiVo storyThere are only a few examples today of what TiVo meant to the culture at large. Google took over search, and billions of people knew the verb. OpenAI has far fewer users and is barely a blip in the zeitgeist. But to TiVo… to perform the act of TiVoing? That was something special and rarified and global. You’re currently a free subscriber to Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. If you’ve been reading or listening to Keep Going for free, you’ve already seen the value of having independent work that isn’t shaped by corporate sponsors or the news cycle’s noise. But independence has a cost. If you find something useful here, if these words make you pause or think, I’m asking you to step up. A few dollars each month means I can keep doing this work without compromise. Without your support, this project stays fragile, balanced on the backs of a few.
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The XTREM INNO is a phone case with a trick up its sleeve (plus I'll send someone one for free)
See that handsome devil up there on that iPhone case? Want to see his face, or anyone else’s, every time you pick up your phone? Then take a look at the XTREM INNO, a clever iPhone case with a full-colour e-ink display built into the back. It turns your phone into a tiny digital picture frame that never needs charging and lets you swap images whenever you feel like it. Oh, and read on, because I’ve got a little giveaway at the end. I really like the idea behind this case. It’s one of those products that immediately makes you smile because it takes a mature technology and uses it in an unexpected way. Instead of treating the back of your phone as dead space, XTREM turned it into a canvas. The catch is the price. At $69, this isn’t an impulse purchase. You have to really like the idea of carrying a personalised phone around every day. Still, after spending some time with it, I found myself warming to the concept more than I expected.
The case communicates with your phone using NFC, so there are no batteries to charge or Bluetooth connections to fuss over. You simply download the companion app, choose a photo, and tap it to the case. The transfer only works while the phone is actually inside the case, but the whole process takes less than a minute. The app is surprisingly rich. Beyond simply displaying your own photos, it includes an AI remix feature that can transform portraits into cartoons, illustrations, and other stylised images. My youngest son immediately began experimenting with it, eventually turning our dog into something that looked like it had wandered out of a nightmare. The results ranged from charming to deeply unsettling, which is probably exactly what the developers intended.
The AI tools use a credit system, but you don’t need to spend anything if you simply want to display your own pictures. Upload any image you like and the app automatically resizes it and optimises it for the limited resolution and colour palette of the e-ink display. The conversion process works better than I expected, preserving enough detail that family photos, logos, artwork, and illustrations all remain recognisable. The display itself is the real star. Unlike an LCD or OLED screen, an e-ink panel only consumes power while changing the image. Once the picture has been transferred, it stays there without draining your phone or requiring its own battery. It feels almost like putting a printed photograph inside a transparent case, except you can change it whenever the mood strikes.
The audience for something like this is admittedly pretty specific. My youngest son loved filling it with ridiculous photos of himself and the family. I could also see anime fans, artists, photographers, or anyone who likes personalising their gear enjoying the ability to change the artwork every day. It feels more like an accessory than a piece of technology.
The XTREM INNO won’t appeal to everyone, particularly at its current price, but that’s almost beside the point. It’s one of those rare gadgets that exists simply because it’s fun. In a world where most phone accessories look identical, that’s worth something. I found myself changing the image far more often than I expected, and every time someone noticed the display, it started a conversation. That’s probably the highest compliment I can give it. Free gift!Now here’s the best part: I’d like to give one lucky U.S. reader an iPhone 16 Pro case that the company sent me. It has my face on it (see above), but you can easily change that. All I ask is that you share this newsletter with a friend somehow (I’ll trust you) and drop me a line with your address at john@biggs.cc with the subject like XTREM CASE. I’ll ship out to one lucky reader I pick at random.
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