TiVo Granted PVR Patents

mnip sent in a Reuters story about TiVo getting patents on its digital television recording technology (also see their press release). Here's one of them - recording one program while watching another.

Comments

Another Troll Feature Story

[the eric conspiracy]

I wish Slashdot would spend a little time in vetting the accuracy of it's stories.

Here's a clue: The title of a Patent is NOT the same thing as what the patent covers or claims.

In Slashdot's posting we have:

Here's one of them - recording one program while watching another.

What the patent really claims (which is far more limited and justifiable) is this:


What is claimed is:

1. A process for the simultaneous storage and play back of multimedia data, comprising the steps of:

accepting television (TV) broadcast signals, wherein said TV signals are based on a multitude of standards, including, but not limited to, National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) broadcast, PAL broadcast, satellite transmission, DSS, DBS, or ATSC;

tuning said TV signals to a specific program;

providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;

providing a Media Switch, wherein said Media Switch parses said MPEG stream, said MPEG stream is separated into its video and audio components;

storing said video and audio components on a storage device;

providing at least one Output Section, wherein said Output Section extracts said video and audio components from said storage device;

wherein said Output Section assembles said video and audio components into an MPEG stream;

wherein said Output Section sends said MPEG stream to a decoder;

wherein said decoder converts said MPEG stream into TV output signals;

wherein said decoder delivers said TV output signals to a TV receiver; and

accepting control commands from a user, wherein said control commands are sent through the system and affect the flow of said MPEG stream.

Did you read the rest of the paragraph?

[IntelliTubbie]

Tivo is obviously not patenting what they're doing, but how they're doing it. Everyone knows that VCRs have done roughly the same thing as Tivo for years -- but the innovative ways in which Tivo can do these things have revolutionized video playback, causing many a Slashdotter to go out and buy one (or want to).

The parser and event buffer decouple the CPU from having to parse the MPEG stream and from the real time nature of the data streams which allows for slower CPU and bus speeds and translate to lower system costs.

Did your mother think of that? I have a feeling that if Slashdot had been around when the mechanical adding machine had been invented, we would have been snickering about the abacus being prior art on the "adding two numbers" patent.

Cheers,
IT

Reading material

[wiredog]

For a good view of patents, innovation, and how one invention builds on another, read "The Evolution of Useful Things" and "The Pencil : A History of Design and Circumstance" by Henry Petroski. He's an engineering professor at Duke who writes an engineering column for American Scientist magazine.

After you read one, or both, of them, reflect on the "obviousness" of pencils and paperclips.

So what are they going to do with it?

[signe]

The fact that they got the patent isn't bad. Heck, they may very well deserve it because someone came up with the PVR concept (which does differ from plain VCRs as long as it takes into account manipulating live TV). Whether or not it was Tivo, well, we'll leave that to any prior art claims.

The real question is what is Tivo going to do with this new patent? Their press release really didn't say anything about whether they planned to start suing ReplayTV, MS UltimateTV, etc. If they're just going to add it to their portfolio and use it for negotiating power when doing deals (a lot of times big companies will do this without actually forcing everyone to license the patent), then more power to them. But if they're going to start attacking the other players, it could really harm the PVR market.

-Todd

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Re:Stop granting "things my mother does" patents!

[Baki]

The point is that all of this is obvious, it was unavoidable to be "invented". All elements making up the "invention" (harddisk recording, multitasking, electronic program guide etc) are also prior art.

The goal of patents is to promote innovation, to make innovation worthwhile. Anything that is due to be implemented by combination of known elements in an obvious way, such as what TIVO does, doesn't need to be promoted by definition, and thus doesn't need nor deserve patent protection. Otherwise patents stifle innovation (because without competition there will be less incentive for further improvements) rather than promote it.

this *might* be okay...

[TheMCP]

While generally I'm opposed to software patents, the TiVo is really a pretty novel invention and probably has some areas where it's genuinely unique, so my general thought is "this doesn't sound so bad."

The patent linked to on the article header here on /. may sound eggrigious from the title, but when I read it I thought it sounded fairly specific - it talks about that the stream is encoded with MPEG specifically, and that audio and video data is separated, and specific functions the unit must be able to perform with the data, and what controls are on the remote. I immediately saw other ways the same functionality could be achieved without infringing on the patent (such as licensing the Sorenson encoder, or not separating video and audio data) - I'm sure any good programmer would as well, and someone specializing in that industry can come up with much better methods to avoid infringement.

So what I want to know is, what are the other patents like, and what is TiVo going to do with the patents?

not cool at all

[janpod66]

TiVo managed to come up with an innovative product that plenty of people (especially here) have found to be extremely useful and worth the price. As such, they deserve to have their advances in technology formally protected, and they have.

TiVo's success wasn't about a great idea. Lots of people had the same idea. Cheap digital video compression technology and harddisks just made it feasible to turn that idea into a consumer product at a certain point in time. TiVo's success was about timing, about lining up investment and going to market at roughly the right point. And a lot of their patents sound to me like stuff any reasonable engineer would come up with as a natural part of designing a PVR, without any significant thought.

See - the patent system isn't all bad :)

We would have TiVo-like devices with or without TiVo: the idea is pretty obvious. Without TiVo or some other company pushing consumer hardware early on, this would probably have started a couple of years later, first as software and hardware add-ons to PCs, Macs, and Linux machines.

Perhaps they can even get some money out of Microsoft for ripping them off with their Ultimate TV.

I don't see any rip-off. And they will be after you when you try to do similar kinds of things with your GPL'ed video recording software on Linux.

By granting these kinds of patents, the PTO risks that for the next 20 years, it could be mainly TiVo that controls this market, without being forced to innovate further. Soon, it will be cheaper to build TiVo-like devices than to build VCRs, yet if TiVo's patents turn out to be broad enough, they can keep the prices and profit margins high.

I think this is actually a good example for why patent life times should be shortened. TiVo should manage to make a tidy profit on their patents in five years. It makes little sense to grant them an artificial monopoly beyond that, no matter whether their patents are sensible or not, and doing so deprives the public of further innovation, in contradiction to the foundations of the patent system.

Of course, since there is so little that is worth recording on TV, it's probably pointless to get very upset about this.

Creative ?

[AftanGustur]

2. The primary gist seems to be the use of a MPEG-specific coprocessor in a certain way that unloads the main CPU from having to do any video encoding / decoding work. IANAL but this does not seem to cover PVR functionality implemented in a PC, given the way most videocards are implemented.

And this is judged creative enought to be granted a patend ??

Sorry, but isn't this *exactly* what MPEG-specific coprocessors are designed for ???

--
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D7272 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc

A preventative chill pill

[RebornData]

I can already hear the flamethrowers warming up from people who haven't bothered to read the press release or the patent filing. In an attempt to head off what will undoubtably be some common misconceptions:

1. The patent does not cover timeshifting- it covers a specific implementation of timeshifting. They reference use of VCRs and hard-disk based video recording systems in the prior-art section.

2. The primary gist seems to be the use of a MPEG-specific coprocessor in a certain way that unloads the main CPU from having to do any video encoding / decoding work. IANAL but this does not seem to cover PVR functionality implemented in a PC, given the way most videocards are implemented.

3. There's a lot of other stuff in there about refinements to the technique- sniffing out program start / stop info by scanning closed captioning information, and so on. Seems legitimately innovative to me.

Of course, if you believe the whole patent system is bunk all of this is irrelevant, but it doesn't look like anything to freak out about. However, it does reference a previous patent on hard-drive video recording dating back to 1994 that might be more troublesome... but I haven't read it.

This is not like a VCR!

[scottdj]

From my reading of the patent application as linked above, you will see that what they are patenting is not being able to watch one program while taping another, but the ability to tape one program while watching another one that is already recorded. This is a significant and concrete improvement over the state of the art, and seems, IMO, worthy of a patent.

--Scott D. Iekel-Johnson

Slashdot is getting just a bit too sensationalist

[irn_bru]

"The Patents cover a METHOD for recording one program while playing back another"

It is obvious that TiVo have patented the act of recording one programme whilst watching another by whatever processes go on within their box, rather than the whole concept of it.

Suggesting the former is just a good way of getting your submission noticed, and causing rampant hysteria in the forums...

Cool

[sharkticon]

TiVo managed to come up with an innovative product that plenty of people (especially here) have found to be extremely useful and worth the price. As such, they deserve to have their advances in technology formally protected, and they have.

See - the patent system isn't all bad :) With all the whinging about one-click patents, we forget that every month, hundreds of patents are granted for worthwhile products, ensuring that research and development continue to thrive.