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Life or Death for Tivo
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."
... until the TiVo v's MythTV flamewar begins... for the nth time
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
http://www.mythtv.org/
According to TFA, they hold a patent on watching one show and recording another at the same time?
I dunno about you guys, but I've had a VCR that could do that since before anyone had come up with the name "TiVo".
(And if this case succeeds, you can kiss any open-sourc PVR software goodbye, you know)
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
No one gives Replay any credit because they don't deserve any. Three failures in a row with three different owners speaks for itself. It was no accident.
ReplayTV is okay if you've never had a DVR before, but I've used both Replay and TiVo and TiVo kicks Replay's ass up one side of the street and down the other. If you simply want to timeshift your TV watching with the minimum amount of effort and bother, with the easiest and most intuitive UI and the best conflict-resolution system out there, TiVo is by far the best, indeed, the only, system out there. No one else even comes close, Replay included.
If you like lots of geeky, but useless, checklist features, Replay is the way to go. But Replay never got the concept of time shifting. Replay's UI is stuck in the old "row and column" TV Guide listings schema, suplemented with endless drop down lists and unintuitive ways of doing things that only an engineer could love. Replay was never designed from the point of view of user ease of use, and it shows. In a word, it sucks.
It was no accident that Replay lost to TiVo in the initial PVR competition circa 1999-2000. TiVo, the better product by far, won.