A Blast From The Past – AOLTV

Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 by MegaZone

Wow, I haven’t thought about this in a long time. Back in 2001-2002 TiVo and AOL were working together on a box called AOLTV. It was kind of a hybrid of WebTV and TiVo, a TiVo box which would also access AOL services like email, web browsing, etc. It never came to market, as AOL dropped the project in early 2002.

I was following TiVo back then and I remember the whole saga, but it was before I started blogging about it. So what brings this up? Well, I discovered today that my RSS feed for the WeaKnees Blog was out of date, and I’d been missing their posts for a while. So I was just catching up on the posts I’d missed when I saw this one.

While looking through some old boxes, someone at WeaKnees found a couple of old AOLTV/TiVo remotes! That’s excellent, I don’t think I’d even seen any of the associated hardware before. It looks like a couple of different prototype remotes – one looks like it is based on the S1 remote, the other looks like an S2 – different size thumb buttons.

Anyone else remember AOLTV?

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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  • http://www.zeigen.com/blog Stephen

    What a painful memory! I wish we could have all that time, energy and effort back.

  • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

    I’ve long been curious about the AOLTV project, and just what it would’ve been like had it shipped. The press reports at the time were always a bit vague.