ReplayTV

» see replaytv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

replaytv never reached turkey at meaningful scale. dvrs in the 1999-2005 window were a us household appliance, sitting under a us cable box, recording shows from us ad-supported networks. in turkey at home in those years i was on a ttnet dial-up that could not even stream a real-time mp3, never mind a tv broadcast. the entire premise of "i'll record this show now and watch it later without ads" assumed a content economy i was not living in.

replaytv launched at ces in january 1999, the same week tivo did. they were the two dvr brands of the early 2000s, and for a moment replaytv was the more interesting one. it had auto-skip for commercials. it could send a recorded show to another replaytv owner over your home broadband. these were features tivo did not have because tivo did not want to fight that fight.

by late 2001 the major networks sued. by 2003 the parent company sonicblue was in bankruptcy. the brand passed through d&m holdings to directv and the consumer dvr market consolidated around tivo and the cable boxes. the replaytv consumer product was finally discontinued on december 19, 2005.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

two features did the damage. "commercial advance" automatically skipped ads on recorded shows, no thumb work required. "send show" let you transmit a recorded program to another replaytv box over the internet. one of these threatened ad revenue. the other looked like piracy infrastructure with a remote control.

tivo had neither. tivo's skip was thirty seconds at a time, deliberately manual. tivo's sharing was local and limited. that restraint was probably why tivo survived and replaytv did not.

~ the lawsuit ~

in october 2001 the major networks sued sonicblue over those two features, claiming they "threatened the fundamental economic underpinnings of free television." it was an unprecedented legal theory, the device manufacturer being held responsible for what end users could do with the device. the court did not rule before sonicblue ran out of money. when d&m holdings bought the brand in 2003 they shipped a stripped-down replaytv 5500 without the contested features. the lawsuit went away because the product everyone was suing about no longer existed.

~ the long tail ~

tivo kept going. the replaytv style of "your dvr does what you want, not what the network wants" effectively ended at sonicblue's bankruptcy. every dvr after that was either tivo or a cable-box where the ad-skipping was disabled by default. streaming services made the whole question of recording moot anyway. the auto-skip feature has lived on in modded plex setups and homelab configs, but it stopped being a thing you could buy on a shelf with a power cord.

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