Their new head of Marketing at Tivo is the same guy who introduced AutoHop on the Hopper, that being Ira Bahr.
Makes sense. Tivo also kind of let Dish pave the way for them by seeing if they could win the lawsuits against the networks. Now Dish has been able to win a few times so it probably gave Tivo the confidence to go ahead with their rollout.
Not only that but Tivo doesn't have to negotiate programming fees with the networks so they don't have the same threat of having channels pulled because of that feature.