Three Trends That Could Kill TiVo

March 19 -- It's always hard to write an obituary, especially when the subject is still alive. It's especially hard for me, because I love the little guy like a brother. But, alas, TiVo will die.

I was one of the first reviewers to get my hands on an early TiVo box. I compared TiVo with ReplayTV, and although I really wanted to like ReplayTV, TiVo won my heart over.

It wasn't the cutesy mascot, although that helped. Rather, it was the drop-dead simplicity and ease of use that even the first version evinced. And to top everything off, TiVo came with the world's best remote control ever, even more astounding for such a fiendishly complex device. Shaped like a dog bone, it was simple to use, easy to understand, and a pleasure to hold.

The Wall Street Journal's arbiter of tech — Walt Mossberg — still thinks ReplayTV was better, and we've argued over the brilliance of the remote. But the acid test, for me, was when I plopped TiVo down in front of my computer-averse wife. She took to it like a duck to water. So much, in fact, that I soon purchased another one just so I could watch what I wanted to see.

But TiVo today has a problem — and it's not what you think. Most folks point to TiVo's inability to convince consumers just how cool the product is and why they need one.

Yes, it's hard to describe why a personal video recorder (PVR) is better than a VCR — until you use one. Give a TiVo to your friends for a month and you'll have to pry the remote out of their cold, dead hands. ReplayTV faces the same challenge, but that's not where the real threat lies.

Instead, a convergence of three separate trends is conspiring to kill off TiVo.

The Three Horsemen

Moore's Law. The first one, ironically, derives from the same technology that enabled TiVo to live in the first place: Moore's Law. As chips got powerful enough and hard drives cheap enough, the PVR was inevitable. But now the raw materials are cheap enough to put hard drive–based video recording into just about anything.

It's not just cheap components. Television delivery has changed, too. The original TiVo was designed to suck in an analog TV signal, via either antenna or cable. It also included analog S-Video and composite ports for set-top boxes, which aside from DirecTV and Dish Network were mostly analog, too.