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Life or Death for Tivo

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-like-his-silly-feet dept.

CUShane writes "The Washington Post is running an article on the patent case between Tivo and EchoStar regarding Tivo's DVR technology. The article states that Tivo has a better than 70% chance of winning, while a loss would basically doom the company. Is there a possibility that the patent system is working right in this case?" From the article: "TiVo attorney Morgan Chu has been arguing in court that TiVo's inability to turn a profit, despite the popularity of its product, is partially because of EchoStar's infringing on its patent. TiVo co-founder Michael Ramsay testified that he showed EchoStar executives the TiVo product and pursued a licensing deal with them, but that a deal was never struck even though EchoStar began selling its own DVRs that used technology very similar to TiVo's."

1 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Was anyone else surprised... by sweetnjguy29 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    No, I am not surprised, in fact, I made the following observation a month ago on slashdot:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179691&thresho ld=0&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=14882574

    TiVo is in a lot of financial trouble, looking at its key statistics: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TIVO [yahoo.com]

    The company has negative earnings per share and its profit margin is almost -25%! Almost 15% of the companies shares on the market are shorted. Thats crazy!

    I think that dropping the Lifetime Service Plan is a desperate gimmick to get more revenue. It might work, but who knows.

    However, I don't think computer based PVRs are going to make a dent in the market...they are too complicated. Adding a card into a computer is too complicated for Joe Schmo. Watching TV on a computer screen is an alien concept to most people. A friend who was over last night thought that watching TV on my PVR-350 was 'interesting'. "You do realize that this is really weird, right?" she said, "I'm not sure if I really liked the experience." But the idea of not having a monthly fee for TiVo intreaged her.

    But...I think that computer based PVRs will make a huge dent in the tech savvy market...because it is flexable...and for now...DRM free.