Slashdot Mirror
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."
What will likely happen in the licensing talks is that they'll (eventually) cross-license to get access to each other's patents - it happens all the time with 'mature' companies.
After all, a nice profitable duopoly is way better than a prolonged legal battle where the lawyers get everyone's money in the end.
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...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
In a world where it's take 'em or lose 'em, can they really be blamed? Often times products are mass patented like this, only to have reasonable licenses come out in the future to the makers (in this case PVR makers). The idea being that if you don't patent it now, someone else will and screw you out of everything.
;)
Why should you let someone else screw everyone when you can do it yourself
I can't say what company I am involved in, but we spend a large amount of our patent money purely on defensive applications. In the end, we don't plan to rape the general public to use it, but we would like to retain rights as the creator.
Tivo is one of those companies that really knows how to hook in their subscribers into a community. For some reason, I don't mind sending Tivo my money. I hope that this doesn't end up being a legal battle that saps Tivo of $$$.
The Replay 4000 is an outstanding box, but for $99 I can get a 30 hour direcTivo and throw 2 120GB IDE drives in it and get ~230 hours of recording time. The war is over. Long live Tivo.
A Tivo is nothing more than a dumbed down PC that's programmed for a single task. I wonder how this patent affects PC's with video capture hardware and software included?
TiVo came up with a great idea, had lots of people copying them, made a patent and won it. Now they are making money on their idea, work GREAT with the community (even allow the mods, and all the updates, they try and keep the mods in mind), and sell their service very inexpensively. And everyone is complaining?
I'm happy for TiVo (especially, because I'm a proud TiVo owner).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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.
The vast majority of patent cases are fought between the small to mid-sized company against much larger entities. Patents are the vehicle by which small and mid-sized companies --like TiVo--can effectively compete on an equal playing field with their much larger, better capitalized competitors.
It is what drives venture money to support start ups for companies founded by dudes with big ideas, and without which, nobody would ever want to be first to market with a big-R&D project.
Behemoth Microsoft is the perpetual defendant, not plaintiff, in these cases. It is the agile, flexible, upstarts who tend to benefit from the patent system, not the monoliths.
How does a tiny company win entry into the "cross-licensing" wars? That's easy, build some serious incremental inventions that improve the technology, and draft your own patent application. Yes, the newly "big boys" will try, at first, to toss you about -- and yes, they will be able to keep you at bay for awhile. But remember, there will be two companies cross-licensing their patents one against each other. If your technology is any good, the one who deals with you first wins! This means that both have to deal with you and guess what? Your good technology generates opportunity and value.
This is what mid-sized Japanese companies did to American consumer electronics in the 70s through the 80s. You decide for yourself who had the edge, those with the foundation patents, or those with the new technologies covered by blocking patents?
Great companies, big and small can be players --ALWAYS-- if they have: (1) technology and (2) savvy. It is true that cheesy, non-technology contributing companies cannot freeload off of the work of those who went before them and compete against TiVo with only TiVo's technology. The benefit of rewarding people who productize and bring to us the PVR as these guys did far outweighs the social costs of the marginal markups.
TiVos are cheap -- very cheap compared to their value. And they are excellent products that have been far more savvy about and friendly to their hacker communities than other counterparts. They deserve all they can milk form this.
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
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.
As much as some software may exist to do this on your own PC, TiVo's software is extremely advanced. The number of features that the TiVo software can provide would require numerous man-months of development on your own time should you wish to throw together a $150 unit.
For starters, there's the software to download scheduling information, the software to present said information visually, the elements which allow you to automatically record shows based on cast members, directors, keywords, or any other item included in that schedule information; components that take care of the timed recording of scheduled (and sometimes unscheduled) shows, the components which allow you to watch a program and record up to two others simultaneously (with DirecTiVo).
Were I to develop the software to do everything that my TiVo can on the PC sitting in my closet, I'd probably dedicate a good 9-18 months perfecting it.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
When I think "patent", images of patent drawings for drill bits are the first association that comes to mind for me... which is the product of a professor who had *scary* levels of experience in the oil industry, but which will serve as a good example in this case.
Patents for drill bits cover *implementation* ideas. Perhaps this patent isn't for a solid bit, but rather one that has three conical rotating parts on sleeve bearings. Perhaps that one isn't for a pure tungsten carbide surface, but rather one that uses tungsten carbide to hold diamond grains in place. Implementation details.
If anyone had tried to patent "getting oil out of the ground" instead, they would have been laughed to death. If you were a tool bit manufacturer, you licensed patented ideas because they were faster, cheaper, or more reliable, not because they were the only way to do the job.
So that's the first problem I have with software patents: they tend to patent the job, not just one way to do it. If your PVR idea uses a fast general purpose CPU instead of a specific MPEG encoder chip, if it uses MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2, or if it's not even a physical product but instead just a software package you run on your computer with tuner card... well, even if you don't resemble Tivo at all in implementation, you probably fall under their patents for just solving the same problem of "pausing live TV".
The second problem is that they're patenting the obvious. Given the question, "how would you make it possible to pause live TV", exactly what percentage of Slashdot readers do you think would be unable to figure it out? Implementing it would probably be beyond the reach of most of us... but if Tivo were patenting their implementation, I'd expect to see source code in the patent.
Tivo thought of a new market. That's a wonderful thing, but should they be allowed a 17-year monopoly in it because of it?
- 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 if Tivo only had a Real Time fast forward capability, I'd take up sports gambling as a profession.
Tivo doesn't make the patent rules, you (the voter) do. Unfortunately (for them) they still need to play by those rules, which don't favor small companies enough in most cases.
Far from raking in the dough, Tivo is keeping prices low, while losing money. (For the 3 months ended 10/31/2001, revenues were 5,342; after tax earnings were -33,838.)
You would be hard pressed to find a cheaper way of creating a tivo like system, of comparable performance, from commercially available parts. Jumpy video in the window of a crashing pc isn't the same.
Tivo is licensing, so development can and will continue!
The Tivo service has been very unobtrusive to me so far. I'd gladly watch 1 targeted commercial at my convenience a month to help them out.
I've always thought that the "Everything you ever wanted to know about product X channel" would be a great idea. It would be nice to be able to get a real professional sales video about all of the features of that new car that you might want to buy ON DEMAND. Tivo just figured out how to use the DEAD AIR in the middle of the night to make the cost of such a channel acceptable.
I want to be able to select something like:
Product Videos -> Cars -> BMW -> 325 -> (BMW, Car & Driver, Road & Track) and watch 3 videos on the new 325 series at my convenience. I win, BMW wins, and Tivo wins. What's the problem?
Same thing with vacation destinations, digital cameras, etc. Anything where a static page of info just isn't enough.