Sad news for such a formerly iconic brand. I was a series 1 owner since before the turn of the millennium. We still have a Tivo Roamio in the house that gets regular use as an excellent OTA DVR.
I would think this technology could be produced relatively inexpensively, and since the niche is so small at this point they can charge whatever they want and it’s just pure profit. Perhaps someone with these kind of skills should create one and do a Kickstarter
There are a number of other homebrew DVR projects (the last time I looked anyway). However, the Tivo experience was always the best. It was a solid interface and rock solid hardware. Performance was never anemic. “It just worked”.
The most failures I saw were in hardware in the mechanical disks (user replaceable), and the power supplies (where they later switched to external bricks, also user replaceable). You could buy a Tivo for grandma and not have to worry she’d ever have to log into a console terminal to flush a cache or restart a process.
Part of Tivo Inc’s business failure, I imagine, is that fewer people are subscribing to cable, and the OTA TV market is just so small it isn’t a viable business model anymore. The tide has shifted to watching TV via streaming now.