Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
TiVo was founded on Aug. 4, 1997, by two Silicon Valley engineers, Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton. Their original idea involved a form of home networking technology, but they soon settled on what for many is the home's most essential appliance: the television.
Their aim was to improve people's experience with the boob tube by giving them more control. Within two years, they had a product. For $399 you could buy a black box that offered 30 hours of recording time. And for a $9.95 monthly fee you received access to a searchable (by actor, channel or subject matter) online directory that allowed you to choose the shows you wanted to watch or record.
TiVo also did something revolutionary: It let you fast-forward through the commercials with split-second speed. Television, as Michael Lewis said in an August 2000 New York Times Magazine article, would never be the same.
But TiVo hasn't always been a geek's best friend. To soften the potential blow against the advertising industry, TiVo offered concessions bound to rile privacy-conscious geeks. First, it only fast-forwarded past commercials, while competitor ReplayTV completely skipped them. Second, TiVo offered a special, ad-friendly carrot: Because TiVo units collect data on every remote-control click that users make -- every saved program, every fast-forwarded commercial -- advertisers could use TiVo to target their campaigns as never before.
Broadcasters bought the pitch. Both NBC and CBS invested. But a privacy foundation slammed the company for failing to clearly disclose its collection policy, and one critic wrote a scathing book on the subject called "Spy TV."
Still, TiVo has managed to keep most critics at bay by offering a product that people like. By spring 2000, many TiVo users were too busy playing with their boxes to care about whether the company knew they loved "Ally McBeal." And hardcore techies, who frequently bought three or four units at a time, took advantage of another feature -- TiVo's relative openness. TiVos were easy to crack open and figure out and, ultimately, improve.
Ron Curry, an early TiVo hacker, said one of the first targets of hackers was the hard drive. After figuring out how the hard drive communicated with the operating system, hackers came up with ways to add space, and thus save more hours of programming. At that time, the TiVo tinkering crowd was small: The company had fewer than 50,000 users, and active hackers made up but a fraction of the group. Discussion of their attempts to add more memory remained limited and largely underground.
But then Richard Bulwinkle, TiVo's director of customer relations, who spends most of his days interacting with the TiVo faithful on Internet message boards, publicly announced that TiVo didn't mind the hacking.
"I essentially made a public statement saying we would not go after people for adding memory to their boxes," Bulwinkle says. "We did not say you can hack us ad infinitum, but we did say we would not prosecute people for putting in more memory."
Suddenly, TiVo stood out from the crowd. Instead of trying to protect one of its revenue streams -- the company sold extra memory at the time -- TiVo embraced hackers' desire to build on what they owned. The company and the hackers began to build a mutually beneficial "nonrelationship," says Marc Chametzky, an engineer and TiVo fan.
"I was surprised, but it made sense when I saw it from their perspective," he says. "In some sense, having a box that can be hacked to have more storage makes their [equipment] more attractive and gains market share. In fact, this was definitely the case, as we saw several staunch ReplayTV supporters switch sides solely because of the ability to increase the capacity of TiVo receivers."
The tolerant attitude, however, immediately led to more hacking. Dozens of people touted the ability to add memory, while others started finding backdoors into TiVo's software. Some found the remnants of a tool that let users fully skip commercials instead of fast-forwarding through them. Others found a code that opened a file listing TiVo's main developers. Some people even found a way to access TiVo's logs -- to see exactly when their boxes dialed into TiVo and what information was sent back upstream.
Again, TiVo didn't complain. "We like hackers," Bulwinkle insists. The backdoors could have been removed, "but they help us with development and they're fun for hackers, so we leave them there," he says. "It's the kind of thing that management said we couldn't put upfront but still wanted to include."
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