I have to confess that I didn’t remember seeing this one ever – and I’ve been working with TiVos for many, many years now. I was digging through some old boxes and I turned up these remotes with AOLTV buttons:
So I did some searches and found this link to an old story about a partnership that never blossomed.
I’m still not sure how you would change the volume with that remote on the right, but it seems ideal for Simon Says.
2 replies on “TiVo AOL – the Deal that Never Made It”
I’m a software engineer by trade and worked a short contract stint at Hughes Network Systems in Gaithersburg, MD. While I was there I worked on a project called AOLFusion, which was a TiVo unit that allowed you to surf the internet (with an AOL account ) via a modem in TiVo box and use your TV as a display. The project was in bad shape when I got there and worse when I left a few months later. Most of the code was written by H1B visa types who did a very, very poor job and the performance was bad to boot. HNS went through a phase where they were being shopped to be bought (I believe) by Rupert Murdoch, and the HNS management decided to kick out the contractors they had working there (which were something like 50% of the work force and about 80% of the people with a clue).
That’s awesome! Do you have any more pics of these? I’d love to see the full remotes to see how they differ, I can see a bit that some of the other buttons are different.
If you have these remotes – I wonder if you have an old AOLTV prototype hiding somewhere.