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."

Comments

Goodbye small players in that market!

[sterno]

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...

Re:Patents and Licensing

[Zaknafein500]

• 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.

Re:Patenting the methods, not the idea

[spectecjr]

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.