TiVo won the court battles, but lost the TV war
TL;DR
TiVo popularized DVR features like pausing live TV and became a household name, but despite winning patent battles, it ultimately lost the broader TV market competition.
In the 2000s, TiVo reached heights few companies ever achieve. Like Google and Xerox, its name became a verb. People had to "TiVo" the new episode of Battlestar Galactica or game 4 of the Red Sox vs. Cardinals, not "record" it. While it didn't invent the DVR, TiVo popularized it and many of the features we would eventually take for granted, like the ability to pause or rewind live TV, and watch one program while recording another.
Those features were covered in the now infamous US Patent 6,233,389 - better known as the Time Warp patent. TiVo spent a good chunk of the 2000s and early 2010s defending its intellectual property through a serie …