TiVo vs EchoStar - TiVo Wins

ssuchter writes "A jury just ruled in favor of TiVo in their suit against EchoStar, awarding TiVo $73M of the $87M they asked for. From the article: 'TiVo had sought $87 million in damages from the Dish satellite-TV network in a patent dispute that TiVo lawyers said could be "life or death" for the company that sold the first box for pausing and rewinding live television.'"

Re:Well, this saves Tivos butt...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not bad news at all. TiVo will make lots of money until the patents expire, but that is many years away. By then TiVo plans to be well entrenched in the household and be making money off of advertising, by redefining the way we watch TV ads (yes, we will still "watch" ads, but more like we "read" magazine ads or Google ads). The patent money is just a stepping stone towards TiVo's ultimate goal of being the Google of TV advertising.

So, uh

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo's suing competitors for patent infringement rather than trying to outcompete them.

Is MythTV next?

"multimedia time warping system"

[Cthefuture]

What the hell kind of patent is that?

What kinds of patents does TiVo actually have? Are things like MythTV at risk?

I have been considering writing my own Myth-like software. I would hate to get it shut down because of some stupid GUI patent or something.

Re:More expense for the consumer

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me, the cable DVRs were never really "free". You were paying for it somewhere in your cable bill, anyway. Now, all that will change is maybe a few bucks will go to TiVo, Inc., instead of into the pockets of the cable companies. I doubt anyone will notice the change.

What is a big plus is that the chances are greatly increased that cable subsribers will have the option of using the vastly superior TiVo software on their cable DVRs (as will soon be the case for some Comcast subscribers), rather than the slapdash piece of crap DVR software that is currently offered to cable subscribers because the cable companies know the customer don't have any choice and don't know what they are missing. That will change, thanks to this legal decision.

Prior art from long, long ago

[sunderland56]

The Abekas A62 disk recorder could record one video stream, while playing back another. It was introduced in the mid 1980's, so any patents involved have likely run out by now. Abekas even won an Emmy award for it in 1986.
It was meant for professional studio use, cost about $150K, and only held 100 seconds of video - but hey, that was 20 years ago. I'm not sure how Tivo can claim to have invented the technology.