Branding
TiVo Turns 25
A short history of a game-changing brand — and brand name.
There were no “smart TVs” when TiVo introduced its digital video recorder on March 31, 1999. There was no way to pause or rewind a television program while it was in progress; skip past commercials in real time; or record and watch programs whenever it suited you — not unless you had two videocassette recorders or some high-end professional equipment and knew a lot of what were then called “trick plays.”
Today, all of those functions that seemed like wizardry are familiar and even mundane thanks to TiVo, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The technology was groundbreaking. But a large part of TiVo’s appeal was its name.
TiVo was an early DVR, but it wasn’t the only one. And it wasn’t always called TiVo. Founders Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay had created their company in 1997 and named it TeleWorld. A competitor called Replay, capable of many of the same functions as Barton and Ramsay’s device, went on the market two months before TiVo’s launch.
What sort of name is “TeleWorld”? It’s a perfectly logical engineer-brain name, created by jamming together the front part of “television” with “something big”: the world. Descriptive, literal . . . and boring.
