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TiVo Issued Additional DVR patents
LoadStar writes: "In the never ending war of the DVR's (originally covered by slashdot here (1) and here (2)), TiVo was granted 2
more patents today -- they cover TiVo's 'trick play' features -- 'pause live TV as well
as rewind, fast forward, play, play faster, play slower, and play in reverse' -- all the
features that make a DVR a DVR. Interestingly enough, TiVo also patented 'a simple and
reliable method for connecting TiVo DVRs and other streaming media devices to a network
in the home,' a feature that to my knowlege does not currently exist in TiVo products
without serious hacking. In related news,
SonicBlue announced it would start licensing talks with TiVo,
probably believing that the last set of patents granted to them gave them the ammunition
necessary to get TiVo to cave and pay a royalty."
Okay, so Tivo will license to Sonicblue in exchange for Sonicblue licensing to Tivo. So in the end, they'll reach a push because it's in both their best interests to establish this mutual licensing.
The problem though is that small players are going to be screwed because they will have to negotiate with and pay two seperate companies for the licensing rights to that technology. So we can expect that for the forseeable future we will only have Tivo, ReplayTV, and any other big players who can afford to pay the licenses (Microsoft, etc).
So why do we have patents again? I keep forgetting...
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Don't forget the MPEG-2 encoder (for standalone units) and the modem. And the control software.
And remember, TIVO really has very little to do with the hardware (besides maybe specification). They are really a software company. They wrote the software that controls all that hardware, and let other people (Sony, Phillips, etc.) build the hardware. I'm sure TIVO wishes they could get the hardware price down as well, but I don't think they have quite enough volume yet to convince those HW manufacturers to take a smaller profit margin.
Check out The Tivo forums. There is alot of information there.
Its a Directivo, and there are some issues. Mine came with a "defective" remote, that Philips replaced in about a week.
I basically walked in to a Circuit City, scoped them out, and found out about the price. I am already a DirecTV subscriber, so that wasn't an issue. New subs get a free installation.
Three nights later I'm 'taping' Dolby Digital 5.1 movies from Starz East. Heh.
PLEASE, if there is a $90 Tivo out there at Circuit City or a competitor, post it by all means.
TiVo's Special Offers page has numerous units ranging from $49.99 (for new DirecTV subscribers--or $79.99 for existing subscribers) to $299.99.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
Let's see .. playing a media stream at varying speeds. In MPEG video, it's moderately complex to skip frames, but I would be surprised if it were not discussed in mpeg literature for use in systems which cannot decode the full stream in realtime, but must instead decode every Nth frame (N=2-4). Playing more slowly just involves showing a frame for more than one retrace. Any decent MPEG player should already have frameskip control, and wiring a timebase multiplier to a UI knob is not rocket science.
Playing and recording at the same time is a simple matter of having a multitasking OS, a disk fast enough to handle the bandwidth of two streams, and separate encoder/decoder hardware.
As for "connecting DVRs to a network in the home", DVRs are just another piece of network hardware. Streaming media technology is probably the subject of patents that precede DVRs. Besides, the hard parts of streaming are when bandwidth is scarse, which isn't the case over ethernet (2mbps wireless excepted)
Playing backwards is a little more complex than playing forward at variable rate, but again most DVD players have this capability. This patent has a April 1998 application date, but DVDs date to 1995 ("December 09, 1995: The final DVD format is originally announced.") Since DVDs are streams of video, the capabilities of DVDs to manipulate the order in which the stream is presented seem relevant. Surely "play in reverse" wasn't missing from DVD for their first two years of existence..
Other posters have discussed how SonicBlue and TiVO will probably cross-license, and the patents wouldn't stand up to scrutiny anyway, so the only thing they'll be good for is to raise the bar against additional participants in the DVR market (those who don't have deep-enough pokets to withstand a lawsuit, which means any startup...) and maybe to furnish C&D-letter fodder for OpenDVR software projects.
Hate stupid software on freshmeat? Laugh at
That's $250 promotional procing that's available for a 30 hour unit, and $199 for a 120G drive at Fry's.
It's Linux, and if they don't encourage hacking the units, they certainly tolerate it. Besides, it's cool to get a bash prompt on a piece of off-the-shelf equipment. Cooler still to support a company that uses Linux.
There's still the $10/month or $200 lifetime programming fee, but even so, it's worth it.
We've had ours for 18+ months and don't know what we'd do without it now. My folks are getting one (just the 30-hour version; we can always add a hard drive later) for Christmas.
Sure you could build something similar. But that'd be a lot of effort to save at most a couple hundred dollars and have a less polished result. I don't know about you, but it doesn't take much of my time to be able to justify the extra money involved. Especially when I want to relax and watch TV, not chase about inside gdb debugging why Friends caused a core dump.
- I'm sure TIVO wishes they could get the hardware price down as well, but I don't think they have quite enough volume yet to convince those HW manufacturers to take a smaller profit margin.
TiVo is in the hardware business in about the same way as nVidia is in the hardware business. TiVo creates the reference designs and the software, then contracts the work out to 3rd parties. TiVo even grants subsidies to its hardware manufacturers to keep the price of the units as low as they are. TiVo actually loses money on the sale of its PVRs, expecting to recoup the losses in subscriptions.TiVo has introduced a new form factor with the DirecTiVos and the new AT&TiVo box that is being sold through AT&T Broadband. This new form factor is much cheaper to produce. Consequently, you can find DirecTiVos for under $100, sometimes less than $50. The AT&TiVo box is still around $300 for a 40-hour, but this is still quite a bit cheaper than what you would pay for a 40-hour standalone under the old form factor. The new box also has USB ports, so future networking upgrades are a (although somewhat distant) possibility.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
There can be quite a stretch between when a technology is invented or marketed and when a patent issues. For the type of technology for TIVO, I would expect at 15-18 month period before the patent office even looked at the application. Then you get into 3-6 month cycles of the patent office acting and the inventor responding. It is not at all unusual for patents to take 2.5-3.5 years to issue after application.
In the US, you have 1 year after you make your invention public to get the application on file. (The US system emphasizes getting the product to the public over getting a quick patent filing -- most of the rest of the world has the opposite emphasis.) A credible timeline could look like:
1) First player offered for sale (day 1)
2) Patent application filed (year one)
3) Patent application read by patent office (year 2.5)
4) Patent issues (year 4.5)
That would be a credible timeline if the inventor didn't have to fight tooth and nail to get the patent. Things can be a year shorter in easy cases, or much longer in hard cases.
One of the patent applications was filed in April 1998, the other in August of 1997. So we are dealing with 3.5-4.25 years. It looks to me like they got their applications on file and got them allowed in a reasonably quick time.
Submarine patents aren't an issue any more, because the duration of a patent is determined by the filing date, not the issue date. (International harmony and lessons learned owing to the practices of Jerome Lemelson made for that change)
Now, they've started adding pre-taped video segments (filling up my hard drive, I assume) of BMW ads.
Those ads use space that was already set aside by TiVo. They do not use up any space that you could use.
The idea of pausing live TV is obvious.
But the actual method that the TiVo developers used to accomplish this isn't. And that is what they are patenting.
And before anyone says that the method IS obvious, remember, in hindsight, everything's pretty obvious.
Sliding Window algorithms for the storage of streaming data are pretty damn obvious. They're documented everywhere. In Knuth. In the TCP/IP spec.
EVERYWHERE.
The only conceivably 'new' thing about this is that it's being used to store MPEG datastreams. I don't particularly count that as innovative or 'new'. Or patentable.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The network hack for Tivo does not work anymore along with many other hacks since the latest firware update. So fuggit aboud it.
Someone may make some sort of hacked flash prom that will allow your changes not to be overwritten, but not yet.
Do you have data for this, anecdotal or otherwise?
lot's of it. But here are a few data points. The largest software arts patent verdict was STAC v. Microsoft, >$110M for STAC (and a $10M counterclaim for Microsoft in return).
Outside software arts are the famous cases of Jerry Lemelson, who got huge verdicts from Ford and other players with his greater than 500-strong patent portfolio.
Other cases that come to mind involve upstart Amazon versus big brick and mortar Barnes & Noble. And of course there's Eolas v. Microsoft, Priceline v. Microsoft, and so it goes. Apple bought itself some space (and cash) by settling its patent case against Microsoft days after Jobs rejoined.
Big companies used to be the only guys that filed patents.
Hardly. The independent inventor movement is and has been one of the most significant political forces driving the patent system. Although it is true that the Fortune 500 is littered with big companies that derived from little guys inventive and patented successes that allowed small and mid-sized companies to grow large.