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TiVo Buys Six New Patents From IBM
Thomas Hawk writes "TiVo reported in an 8-K filing today that on March 31, 2005 they purchased six new patents from IBM. The patents purchased reportedly have to do with audience research and measurement, integration of television signals with internet access, automatic rescheduling of recordings, content screening, enhanced program information search and electronic program guide interface enhancements. For those of you privacy advocates out there you will love Patent No. 5,872,588: Method and apparatus for monitoring audio-visual materials presented to a subscriber. " The link has very little additional information.
One of those patents actually depends (in IP sense) on patents bought by IBM from RCA in the 70s.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
The link has very little additional information
No kidding. In the interest of promoting more discussion, here's the abstract from patent #5,872,588:
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
One of the patents appears to be "A method for diversion of eyeballs in conjunction with the suspension of sound during commericals".
The link has very little additional information.
Well its the submitter's blog. I was about to call a Roland Piquepaille on this, but there aren't any ads on the site.
Here you go!
Every time I see any sort of list of the things IT companies have pattented, I have to shake my head in wonder. Is it just me, or is half this stuff common sense, not a breakthrough in tecnology. If they can give a pattent for 'enhanced program information search', I am surprised that Google hasn't simply gone through the dictionary and patented a search for every item that has an electrical signal. These things should be features, not patents.
Even as a junior employee, George was always better at writing functional specifications than literature.
How are the patents "new"?? Patent #5,872,588 was filed in February 16, 1999 ... that's over 6 years old!
:).
IBM must have hired a really good cleaning crew to make TiVo think it was shiny and new
my blog
Woah for a second there I read:
TiVo Buys Six Packs From IBM
and was very scared for both the legality of an older company selling beer to a younger company and also I was worried how that might corrupt an innocent little company like TiVo.
There's more info on the 8K filing here
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I assume most of these patents were bought with for the TiVo Recommends functionality. I'm sure they can (and will) be used to gather information about the end user but that's not what I'm concerned with here.
As an owner of two TiVo's, I've always disabled this feature. It's not that I don't want to know what TiVo thinks I might like, that could be interesting, it's that for the most part, this feature has always been pretty wasteful. It's recommended shows that relate to other shows I've only recorded once. Instead of recording the shows, a Tivo page with suggestions and say the teaser would be much more helpful.
-Teiresias
The link has very little additional information.
Well, you've done it now -- now we're not going to RTFA!!
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Maybe a restriction of some sort, but this sounds bad.
Some people invent. They don't care to bring the products to market, there are others that are very good at that. This allows them to sell their idea, get money, and move on to the next invention.
Some people even invent usefull stuff, although that is far less common.
Uh, right, like making a profit by selling the rights to their invention. Not everybody has an industrial complex in their backyard. Good call. +1 Insightful for sure.
Jeeze, everybody is an expert around here. I hope there's an alternate universe where IP professionals bitch and moan on an internet bulletin board about how IT professionals are idiots who can't perform their duties.
Maybe this will make my Tivo smarter about recording programs. Right now, if we tell TiVo not to record something on a season pass, we have to go into the TiVo and tell it to record later when the same show plays again. But some shows have no descriptions, so we can't tell which of the upcoming episodes is the one we want to record.
However, TiVo might be able to distinguish between them using some kind of internal identifier. If it was smart, it would respond to "don't record now" by rescheduling the recording for the next time the same episode was on. I'd like to see it get smart.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
As everyone and their brother/sister jumps into the timeshifting business (even FLOSS), Tivo needs to stay viable. They can do that with marketing information. Correct me if I am wrong, but these patents look like they have to do with collecting data about viewing. Such market information is worth quite a bit to advertisers. I expect Tivo to use these patents to force cable providers who also do timeshifting either to take no marketing data from their services or to pay Tivo royalties for the privledge.
-LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
little further information" /. by roland pipquille
and immediately checked to see if it had been submitted to
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Why that's very best kind of information! We can fill in all the gaps with our hopes, fears and dreams and then argue endlessly about them. Rock on Slashdot! Rock on.
Arbitrary sig
Seems like TiVo are working on keeping ahead of the cable providers who are chasing them down on their market.
If they can keep working on new things to make TiVo more desirable to the consumer, purchases like this will pay off in the long run.
Business Voyeur
My opinion (and probably many others too) is that it is too easy to get a vague patent without ever having the intention to actually implement it. Just sit all day long, figuring out cool stuff that may or may not be possible with todays technology and then file patents. Then, some years later someone spends a lot of time and money and comes up with something that the original patent in some way or another covers, and wham, they have to pay.
It's fairly obvious to a direct marketer like myself (ducks) that these patents are preparatory to turning TV into a direct-response medium (dodges).
Specifically, they will be able to track viewership in real time, at the individual level (sidesteps), and link that viewship to Internet use (cringes), i.e. knowing how many of the 321,456 males age 18-35 who watched your commercial for the new Ronco Sex-o-Matic actually went online and ordered one.
On the plus side, it shouldn't take too long for the system to fine tune itself to your tastes, and show you mostly commercials for stuff you actually want to buy (feigns unconciousness).
Oh please. Privacy advocates nothing. I am as big of a privacy nut as the rest of you, but I'm also in the advertising industry so I know that in order for tv to work the way it does today, this patent is important. You see, the main reason you have "free" television is because advertisers are willing to shell out MAJOR dollars for air time. Now, if you were spending that much money, wouldn't you want some way to know your ad ran when they said it would? And keep in mind that you typically don't buy ad space for a SPECIFIC time, but rather a "time-slot". This patent is clearly related to how networks track the running of ads so they can give assurance to advertisers that they were getting what they paid for.
Now, if they had technology to monitor audio and video OUTSIDE THE TV (ie. watching what you the viewer do and listening to what you say), that would be a different thing, although I'm sure Neilson would find many people willing to be monitored like that in exchange for big bucks.
Hey, I should patent that idea.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I hope there's an alternate universe where IP professionals bitch and moan on an internet bulletin board about how IT professionals are idiots who can't perform their duties.
The problem I have with IP is patents are granted to people who have yet to create an invention. Patents should only be granted to actual, functional devices.
It's like this: just because one might dream of owning a ranch in Montana, doesn't mean one actually holds property there. Yet that is how our current patent system works.
Proverbs 21:19
He said to restrict transfer, not licence... If you want to just come up with the idea and farm it out to some company to produce You can still retain your patent, you just give them explict right to use it.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Indirectly, it then also becomes a defense against attacks on Linux.
So, it may actually make sense that IBM would sell these patents outright. They have more utility being used by Tivo than directly by IBM.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
So long as IBM held the patents, there was a good chance they'd stay out of the hands of Microsoft, Time Warner, Comcast, etc. I doubt Tivo has the cash to hold off a determined effort by any of those companies. Should those patents fall into the wrong hands, it could put a serious crimp not only on stand-alone PVRs, but even the PC boards that have equivalent functionality.