Back in the days when the dot-com frenzy was nearing its peak and I was covering high-tech full-time for this newspaper, scarcely a week passed without someone showing up in our newsroom offering a demonstration of a new consumer gizmo.

Almost always these machines and the services they supported provoked yawns. As the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, there was nothing new under the sun. Until the day a team from a company called ReplayTV wheeled in a television set wired to a box with a digital hard drive inside. They hooked up this digital video recorder to a cable jack and showed how we could use it to record, pause, rewind and fast-forward live TV.

As I've often related since then, that was the only time I ever walked away from one of those demos thinking, "That will change my life, and I must have it." A Replay executive predicted, "Five years from now, all TV will be watched from a hard disk." Watching the device in action, that seemed right.

The intervening years can be thought of as the TiVo era, named for the surviving device of a two-company technology battle with ReplayTV. "TiVoing," meaning to record a show for later viewing, even became one of those generic gerunds, like "Xeroxing" or "Googling."

But on Oct. 1, TiVo, now owned by the technology holding company Xperi, ended sales of its physical video devices. They're no longer being manufactured and its own supply is "depleted," the company says, though it says it will continue to serve existing owners. TiVo is now TiVo OS, an operating system marketed to makers of Smart TVs.

In other words, the era of the TiVo set-top box is over. Its history should teach us a few things: The ineluctability of technological change in the consumer industry. The difficulty of riding out technological revolutions. The trend toward ever-improving video images transmitted via broadband.

Looking back, one can see that digital video recorders were a transitional technology in the march from over-the-air broadcasting to streaming, which is wiping out the usage of DVRs. But they were an essential step in the ultimate divorce of viewing habits from broadcast TV's no-choice time-and-place regimentation.

More important, by enabling their users to avoid commercials (though to varying degrees, as we'll see) they knocked a pillar out from the industry's advertising-supported business model. Indeed, when the TV industry struck back at ReplayTV in 2001 with a lawsuit over features like the skip-ahead, the plaintiffs, which included NBC, ABC, CBS, Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Co., asserted in their complaint that ReplayTV harmed them because "commercial advertising is a crucial (and often the sole) means by which plaintiffs receive payment" for their programs.

Now let's look at the history.

In 1999, ReplayTV and TiVo brought out very similar players simultaneously. For a year or so they battled it out in the slowly growing DVR space. They both had the same problems growing the market: The things were not merely novel and could be challenging to program, they were also expensive. When first rolled out, ReplayTV's top-of-the-line box cost $599 (about $1,200 in today's money). TiVos cost $399—but came with a $199 fee for a "lifetime" subscription, without which the thing wouldn't work.

When I reviewed the boxes for The Los Angeles Times in 2000, I found that both had flaws, including a degraded video image even at the highest resolution settings. But I judged ReplayTV to be technically superior in several respects. (When I bought my own unit after sending the company review loaners back, it was a ReplayTV.) It should go without saying that DVR technology has improved hugely since then.

In a perfect world, technical superiority should have made ReplayTV the winner in this two-gizmo race. But the companies had very different business models, and ReplayTV's foretold its doom: It gave its customers a function they wanted and loved, but in doing so ticked off the entities that really matter in video entertainment, the networks and the advertisers.

That function was a 30-second skip-ahead button, enabling you to skip commercials entirely, 30 seconds at a time. The industry hated that.

TiVo looked ahead to a future of striking lucrative deals with the networks and selling advertisers space on its home screen. With a TiVo box you could fast-forward but not skip, so you couldn't avoid seeing the pitch, even if at turbo speed. Commercial producers found a solution to that soon enough — it's why when you speed through a commercial today, sometimes there are moments where the image is frozen, no matter the speed — that's when the sponsors sink the needle in the speed-demons' arms.

By the time of the industry lawsuit ReplayTV was owned by SONICblue, a maker of briefly popular digital music players. But those devices got wiped out after Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. SONICblue filed for bankruptcy in 2003. ReplayTV then got shuttled from owner to owner, getting whittled away as its technology became more outmoded. The industry dropped its lawsuit after SONICblue filed for bankruptcy and brought out a ReplayTV box without the skip-ahead button or other troublesome features.

In 2007, ReplayTV's remaining assets were bought by DirecTV, though no one could really understand why, since DirecTV was already using DVRs from another company. All that was left of ReplayTV was a programming screen still provided to its device owners by another company, but that was shut down forever on July 31, 2011.

TiVo had continued to operate, but at first its customer base grew slowly. It tried to interest cable operators in adding DVR technology to their set-top boxes, but in 2003, I wrote that TiVo had experienced "notably little success" with this approach.

At that point, only about 1.7 million DVRs had been sold to U.S. consumers, out of 105 million TV-viewing households. (TiVo's installed base was six times the size of ReplayTV's.) "Digital video recorders are not exactly a flop," I wrote, "but the number of users has probably failed to keep pace with the number of newspaper stories that quoted TV executives fretting that mass commercial-skipping might destroy the business model of broadcast television."

Michael Ramsay, TiVo's co-founder, blamed the price, arguing that DVRs wouldn't reach mass-market penetration until they were priced as about a $100 "add-on" to cable set-top boxes. He was right that the key to acceptance was in the hands of cable companies, which soon saw the light and offered the technology to their subscribers. (I pay $15 a month for my cable DVR, and $13 for the service.)

Within a few years, it was hard to find a box that didn't have a built-in DVR. And I acknowledged that it was "possible, just possible, that five years from now, all TV will be watched from a hard disk."

Sure enough, by 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 46% of U.S. homes had a cable box with a DVR, an additional 7% had a stand-alone DVR such as a TiVo, and only 29% had an internet streaming device. But technology kept marching on: In 2020, the EIA reported, only about one-third of all households still had a cable box with a DVR, 5% more had a stand-alone DVR — and 56% had a streaming device such as a Roku or Google Chromecast.

Since then — indeed, since 2015 — more than 25 million households have cut the cable cord, and the pace appears to be accelerating. The vast majority of cord-cutters cite the high cost of cable, but a preference for streaming comes in second. DVRs aren't needed for streaming services; that's what has made them obsolescent.

The DVR makers could see the change coming. TiVo's abandonment of hardware in favor of pitching its operating system is one manifestation of the shift. Anthony Wood, who founded ReplayTV in 1997 and sold it to SONICblue in 2001, founded Roku, which markets streaming devices and smart TVs, in 2002 as his sixth startup. ("Roku" means "six" in Japanese.) Just in August, he announced that Roku was starting ... wait for it: A streaming service, at the low price of $2.99 a month.

Streaming is a tough business. Major players such as Netflix and Disney are still trying to figure out the best way to attract and keep subscribers. Roku has turned a profit in only one year, 2021, since its 2017 initial public offering; last year it recorded a net loss of $129.4 million on revenue of $3.5 billion. Xperi, the owner of TiVo, hasn't turned a profit since it was spun off from its former parent in 2022.

So the TiVo and ReplayTV boxes that once identified their owners as early adopters of a new video technology have become candidates for museums of obsolete gizmos. They can be had on EBay for $20 or even less.

Looking back, it wasn't much of an exaggeration when that ReplayTV executive told us in 1999 that five years hence, all TV would be watched from a hard disk. Yet with streaming now dominating the marketplace, it's possible, just possible, that a few years from now, no TV will be watched from a hard disk. But TiVo and ReplayTV made their mark for a moment in time, and television was never the same.

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