TiVo is Dead. But It Changed Golf History

I doubt you paid much attention to the funeral, but one of the greatest innovations in television history died this week. The death was not unexpected, but it went mostly unnoticed because it lives on in so many other forms. Its technology is so ubiquitous, it’s hard to imagine watching a sports broadcast (particularly golf) without it.

So it is with a heavy heart that we say rest easy, TiVo, which announced it was no longer selling DVRs and exiting the hardware business after 26 years.

I’m not just talking about the ability to fast forward through commercials. That, of course, will be TiVo’s lasting legacy. Back when DVR technology debuted, you no longer had to get up at 3 a.m. to catch the start of the Open Championship, you could simply set it to record and then catch up on the action without having to sit through the same OMEGA commercial 200 times. And if you wanted to watch a replay of an amazing shot, you weren’t at the mercy of a network that might show it. You didn’t need to wait to watch the replay on SportsCenter. You didn’t have to search for it on YouTube, which didn’t even exist for the first six years of TiVo’s run. You could have a replay at your fingertips. You also didn’t need to wait for a commercial break just to run to the bathroom.

If you grew up trying to record stuff on a VCR, TiVo felt like you’d discovered dark magic. To TiVo something even became a verb, the same way we use Google. DirecTV and Dish Network had to scramble to create similar technology because it was so popular.

Of course, there were some downsides to the technology, and one reared its head in golf: When Tiger Woods hit the flagstick with his third shot on the 15th hole during the second round of the 2013 Masters, no one in attendance at the tournament believed he’d erred when he took a drop and hit his next shot. He made a bogey and moved on to the 16th.

David Eger, a Champions Tour player, wasn’t even watching television when it happened. He was in his yard, helping his wife with a garden project. But when he came back inside the house, he backed up the broadcast with his DVR to see how Tiger made a bogey. That set in motion one of the most controversial rulings in the history of modern golf.

In December of 2017, golf changed its rules so that fans were no longer allowed to call in rules violations from their couch. But the change didn’t come soon enough for Lexi Thompson, who was assessed a four-shot penalty for improperly marking her ball during the ANA Inspiration earlier that year. A viewer had spotted the infraction, watched it on their DVR to be certain, then sent an email to an LPGA rules official. Thompson wasn’t informed of the ruling until the following day, during her final round. She eventually lost in a playoff.

Most people, if they remember TiVo at all, will remember it for the Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl. It made DVRs an essential piece of culture. But I hope when TiVo died, its founders had at least some grasp of the weird, controversial impact they had on golf history.