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TiVo Wins Appeal On Patents For Pause, Ffwd, Rwd
Lorien_the_first_one writes "After years of wrangling, TiVo has won its day in court against Dish Network, formerly known as the EchoStar, when the Supreme Court declined to take up Dish Network's appeal, forcing the satellite television company to pay $104 million in damages. According to the article, 'TiVo originally won a patent infringement case in 2004 against Dish, which was then named EchoStar Communications. It charged that Dish illegally copied its technology, which allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television on digital video recorders.' Despite an injunction, Dish continued distributing its set-top boxes in the belief that the work-around they had implemented avoided infringing TiVo's patents. Now the case goes back to the lower court for review to determine if they did indeed steer clear of those patents."
Oh yeah, second person to post blows goats.
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For $DEITY sake stop tagging stories with story tag or the gets it!
To tag a story with story once is misfortune, to tag a story with story twice is annoying, to do it three its enemy action!
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
As someone who still owns two Tivo's (not being used presently), this is a good day for them. At least they will get a bit of cash. Unfortunately my move to DirecTV, and TiVo's change of focus to Cable and OTA only, I have been forced to use the DirecTV DVRs. While adequate, other DVRs are in NO WAY as feature complete.
Conservative, mod down for violating
It's about the TiVo Multimedia time warping system patent.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
How can they patent fwd, rwd and record when they were present on Betamax/U-matic video recorders (1975/71).. Surely Gods patent on time pre-dates this Tivo one?!
/. but I hope someone reads the article for me soon!
What about all of the digital boxes like Sky/NTL/Virgin Media that have this?
I know this is
It's great nobody patented car turning right yet. Imagine all those left-turn only cars...
Direct and TIVO have inked another deal and there will be new HD hardware for Direct from TIVO coming in a year or so. FWIW - I left DISH for Direct to get TIVO and left Direct to FIOS to keep TIVO. Now I'm stuck on COX but I've got my TIVO!
Anyway, hang in there - relief from that POS "DVR" they provided you is coming!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/03/hell-freezes-over-new-directv-hd-tivo-on-the-way/
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
TiVo is evil; just don't buy them.
I thought ReplayTV came up with this stuff first.
Come on. Every tape record and VHS recorder has had these facilities for donkey's years. So what if you can do it live. GImme a break!!!
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How in the hell can you hope to patent this?
Is this really a novel technology, or a slapping together of a bunch of existing things in a fairly obvious manner. I mean, really, the very first applications on the internet that allowed streaming video and audio supported pause, rewind, and fast forward. I distinctly remember pushing pause on things to allow the buffer to fill up over a slow dialup line. Sometimes, the slow dialup line would enforce a pause for you. ;-)
Other than the fact that it's TV, I don't see this as being any different from real player or a bunch of things which predated it.
This patent really should be vacated, I just can't see how "a buffer with forward and backward access" is actually a novel invention. I'm of the opinion that if you can show any application which streamed multimedia ever had pause etc then the whole patent is invalid.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
replaytv came up with the idea first didn't they?
Erm, how does one fast-forward *live* TV anyway? I can fast-forward a live soccer game to see the result before they've finished playing it?
Sure, the notion of fast forward, pause, and reverse is obvious, but the methodology and working device was, at the time, non-trivial it took some work to get it good, and dish network did "steal" their technique.
Now, are all patents bogus? I tend to think so. There is too much historical account of inventors "rushing to the patent office" to beat their competitor. Now, too me, that seems terribly unfair, one will get the benefit of their research, and another will not.
On the other hand, if you spend a good deal of time and money developing a technology for your business, and a better funded competitor comes along and copies your work and tries to put you out of business, there has to be a way to protect yourself.
Being able to pause a live video stream on the home TV? Then fast forward to catch up to the live stream? No one else was doing that in the late 90's.
Best Slashdot Co
Dish Network is a product. Echostar Satellite LLC is the company. There is no former, only formal.
www.wavefront-av.com
Yeah, I'm glad they lost. They've been bullying people on Ebay who are selling used satellite receivers because they CLAIM that doing so violates their trademark. Read that again. Selling used Dish Network receivers is considered, by Dish Network, to be a violation of their trademark if you don't jump through their hoops. I'm not talking about selling receivers that have been hacked, I'm talking 100 percent legit receivers. That is more heavy-handed than the bullshit that DirecTV pulled 5 or so years ago.
TiVO's patent is a blatent ripoff of VCR/Beta technology...
The only difference is that they converted the ANALOG signal to digital for storage first.
That's the ONLY difference.
DVD players have had backwards / forwards skip as well as fast forward / rewind since inception.
CD players have had them since the 80s.
So there's nothing new here at all..
If they want to shout digital, then CD players (yes, audio only, but it's still digital signal skipping).
If they want to shout video, then VCR's - as they record analog. Skipping is hard to do on VCR's as the media has to stream, but they do have multi-speed FFWD/RWD which is good as you can get with streaming (tape) media.
Skipping is a digital only function, and was implemented in CD players, then DVD players and is in now way unique or non-obvious.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Do not try to rewind the TiVo. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spool.
TiVo calls those functions "Fwd" and "Back".
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Actually, the wikipedia entry is wrong. They Honeywell patent is:
Title: Multiple independently positionable recording-reading head disk system
Abstract
------
A multiple independently positionable recording-reading head optical disk system. The system includes at least one optical disk having an arrangement of data elements. A plurality of recording-reading heads read and write data onto the optical disk. An apparatus for transporting the plurality of recording-reading heads over one side of the optical disk enabling each of the recording-reading heads to read data from or write data onto the optical disk independently of the other recording-reading heads.
--
This is not a TiVo. This is how to record onto optical media with multiple independent read/write heads.
This demonstrates why you should actually verify information in WikiPedia instead of quoting it blindly.
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
That functionality is implemented in all streaming media players though. Even something like Youtube, the Flash player will let you seek back, forth and play as you download (record). The live TV signal could be streaming from anywhere, all TiVo have done is build a streaming media player and put it in a nice box.
As soon as hardware got cheap enough for people to be able to build streaming media players with this sort of functionality people started building them. I had a TV card in my PC years before people started doing live pause. I could record TV but it killed both my CPU and HD so watching the video again wouldn't have been possible anyway. As soon as hardware got fast enough for people to be able to both at once, software started to appear with live pause.
Nick
Fuck all.
Or does a video frame not come at a certain point in a raw byte stream?
Anyone know how this will effect MythTV?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Does this mean that Dish might actually switch to TIVO? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!
I despise Dish's DVR... it crashes on a whim (usually during shows I'm watching) and has a hard time doing three things at once and sometimes even two. It wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't take TEN minutes to reboot.
Realplayer (before tivo): video bits get sucked off the internet [...]
Tivo: video bits get sucked off a video digitizer [...]
Maybe I'm dumb, but I fail to see how using a ring buffer to store video is worthy of a patent.
Unlike video in RealPlayer, video on a TiVo DVR is 1. digitized locally and 2. ring-buffered in rotating magnetic media, not solid-state RAM. If I remember correctly, the buffer in RealPlayer was usually small enough to fit in RAM, which is why you usually couldn't buffer more than a minute.
MythTV
A PC is louder and more expensive than a TiVo box, and the guide data still costs money per month. Besides, I've never seen a PC with MythTV in big-box retail stores in the United States.
and given you are an intelligent slashie
The median home user is not.
Many people seem to be missing that you can patent a novel Way to do something, even if the What is being done is old hat.
TiVo's patents are not on the idea of a DVR, they are on specific user interface features and methods of implementing them in software and hardware.