Over twenty-eight years of covering personal video recorders, digital video recorders, and the surveillance category that eventually replaced both, this blog has conducted long-form interviews with the engineers, designers, and executives who built the industry. This page archives the highlights.
Ten Questions with TiVo’s Director of User Experience (2004)
In late 2004 we sat down with Margret Schmidt, Director of User Experience at TiVo, for what became one of the most-read pieces in our archive. The conversation covered the design philosophy behind the Series 2 remote, why TiVo’s thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system was kept intentionally simple, and how the original interface team approached latency on a 90 MHz PowerPC processor.
Key takeaways that aged well: (1) A DVR interface has to anticipate the couch-distance viewing context and design every primary action to be one button click away; (2) Guide data accuracy matters more than channel count for user satisfaction; (3) The Series 2 menu system was tuned to feel responsive on a CPU that a modern smartwatch outperforms. The design principles she described are now standard practice across every streaming box and NVR app that ships with a remote-or-thumb interface.
Interview date: December 2004. Approximate word count: 2,100. Subject’s role at time of interview: Director of User Experience, TiVo Inc.
Seven Questions with Michael Cronan, Creator of the TiVo Name (2005)
In December 2005 we tracked down Michael Cronan of Cronan Design, the San Francisco brand-identity designer responsible for naming both TiVo and Kindle among dozens of other companies. The interview focused on the process of naming a consumer technology product in a legal landscape where every obvious English word had been trademarked a decade earlier.
What came out of the conversation: naming TiVo was a two-month exercise in finding syllables that felt friendly, were unlikely to carry negative connotations in any major language, and could survive trademark conflict in the FCC-regulated broadcast space. The word "TiVo" was not derived from an acronym. It was selected for phonetic character and tested against linguistic databases in twenty languages before being proposed to the founders. Cronan later used a similar process for Amazon’s Kindle in 2007.
Interview date: December 2005. Approximate word count: 2,100. Subject’s role at time of interview: Founder, Cronan Design.
Why This Archive Matters
Technology interviews from the early 2000s are increasingly difficult to source. Corporate blogs rotate. Magazine archives go behind paywalls. Archive.org preserves HTML but loses context. This page exists to maintain the historical record for two interviews that shaped how many of us think about DVR and NVR design.
If you are a journalist, Wikipedia editor, UX professional, or technology historian looking for a primary source citation, the original long-form transcripts remain in the PVR Blog editorial archive and can be provided on request. Both interviews were conducted under standard editorial conditions with no sponsorship or editorial review from the subjects’ employers.
How to Cite
Schmidt, Margret. "Ten Questions with TiVo’s Director of User Experience." PVR Blog, December 2004.
Cronan, Michael. "Seven Questions with the Creator of the TiVo Name." PVR Blog, December 2005.