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TiVo Relaunching As a Patent Troll?
An anonymous reader writes "TiVo's quarterly call was a bit more dramatic than usual. While they continue to lose customers and innovate 'at a very unhurried pace,' TiVo seeks a repeat DISH Network performance in going after AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) for infringement. Basically, TiVo's current business model appears to be ad sales and patent trolling."
but then TV got boring. So, I canceled all of that years ago. It's a shame they are becoming a troll though, cause I really liked it way back when.
It's not like TiVo is a company set up to collect patents and then chase them down. They've had products on the market for years, would by many be said to have created the home digital recorder (and thus have attained many patents), still have products on the market, and other providers have created products that are now losing TiVo business.
So if the patent is valid (I haven't read it) then surely TiVo have as much right to go after infringers as any other company that has its patents on its products infringed?
I have used several different boxes from Cox Comm. And have been very unsatisfied with them. The Tivo user interface just seems more intuitive.
I have no idea whether the "summary" is biased or not, but if I were to guess the name of the editor just by the language, I would have guessed kdawson.
boop-BOOP ....
Tivo recommends "GET YOURSELF A LAWYER"
It's not trolling if your patent truly covers an innovation, and your competitors copy it. In this case it's called "protecting your rights".
The way I see it, this may have merit, similarly to Netscape vs. MS. - Why would anyone bother buying a tivo when they can just get it right with their cable bill?
Don't Tread on Me
So this should be tagged "!troll" "badsummary" and "bitterposter" because I'm not entirely sure that this summary does it any justice. First, TiVo is not a troll for at least the reason that they actual manufacture products embodying the patent, have done so for a long time, and actually have revenue related to both hardware and subscription fees. [citation needed ;)].
Second, together with ReplayTV (now Motorola?), TiVo really was an innovator in this space. Whether these particular patents were innovative was at least decided with respect to DishNetwork. AT&T and Verizon will now get their chance to try to invalidate it. Who knows, maybe they have some damn good art.
I think TIVO is using the patent system exactly as it was intended. They invented something unique and successfully marketed it, but then various cable and satellite companies decided to not (or to stop) paying the licensing fees and create similar devices. Let's face it, the cable companies aren't all that inovative on their own and they probably wouldn't have come up with the idea for a DVR w/o seeing TIVOs.
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
It's probably a better business model than
1. Spend lots of money to invent the mousetrap
2. Spend more money to make it better
3. Allow cable/satellite to build 80% of your ideas into their own equipment and cut you out of any revenues
4. Profit
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I know people are keen to brand anyone who files patent infringement lawsuits as a patent troll but a real patent troll owns patents but makes nothing - their line of business is to buy patents and sue companies. TiVo actually produces something. They have products and offer something to customers. They are simply enforcing their patents. You are welcome to question the validity of their patents; you are welcome to question the wisdom in starting patent wars with other major companies but, let's keep our discussion real - they are not patent trolls.
It's not like SCO was set up to collect patents and chase them down. They've had products on the market for years...
As someone who is a DirectTV subscriber I can only hint at how much myself and every other DVR user they have that I have talked to miss Tivo when it was DirecTV's DVR offering. This "homebrew" or whatever DirectTV is calling it blows on a level hard to describe.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
It's a legitimate case for used technology.
A patent troll is just someone who patents lots of 'ideas' and then sue whoever happen to have something similar in the market.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
'It's not trolling if your patent truly covers an innovation, and your competitors copy it. In this case it's called "protecting your rights"'
..
--
Apart from the accusation that Dish illegally copied TiVo technology. I would have assumed that there were any number of methods of pausing, rewinding, and recording live television on digital video recorders. A PC, a tuner card, a dual head harddrive, and two instances of FFMPEG
Bill Gates' hurricane stopper
davecb5620@gmail.com
GMAFB, protecting one's patents != patenttroll.
Having said that, TFA is, questionable objectivity aside, a model of a well researched blog posting.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
You don't need a DVR to watch on demand shows
Oh, but you will, you will. Every service starts out without commercials, then a few, then they're crawling out of the screen like locusts. So eventually you will download your hulu into another program, then use that program to skip the inevitable commercial hoarde that is unleashed.
If that program is sold by TiVo, that'll be fine with me.
I'm a long-term TiVo user, but this story reminds me of my simmering frustration with TiVo. Years ago I used a Hauppauge card, and their interface had innovations that TiVo still hasn't picked up on, like a vastly superior conflicts-resolution system. Is there a decent alternative to TiVo, with a better interface? Cable-company solutions are generally poor, as I understand it, and I frankly don't have time to roll my own Myth system. (I would consider an out-of-the-box Myth product, though.) I'd appreciate informed recommendations.
.... you can sit on your ass, hire some lawyers, and soak up millions via your government granted monopoly. Or you can roll up your sleeves and work your ass off innovating, servicing customers, and building up a customer base. What the frick would you choose?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
We can't have TWO tivoization clauses! How are we going to know which one we're talking about?
As I recall, the benefit and patent of TiVo was that they have a recommendation system based upon the user's likes and dislikes. This is much like the Netflix of TV, they recommend different shows you like based on shows that you have watched or rated. Is it possible this is actually a valid claim on the patent that TiVo holds? If the AT&T and Verizon recorders are making recommendations of what to watch, then this very well would infringe on the patent. When TiVo came out, this was a relatively new idea, and not many did it. Before TiVo, there weren't even many TV recording set top boxes.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The patent system is designed to give innovators a temporary monopoly on their innovation, in order to encourage that innovation.
I don't think most people would argue with saying Tivo was an innovator, unlike the "troll" companies who have no product except to enforce patents that they acquired rights to.
Tivo has a product, and they have a legitimate right to enforce their patent rights against companies infringing on those patents.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
What had happened was that the army sent a captain to talk to all scientists working in the Manhatten Project and patent all the innovative ideas. Feynman told this captain, "Well, energy is just energy and you have this nuclear energy now. Just use this in any old thing that needs energy and presto! you got a patent. Put it in a ship Nuclear Powered Ship, put it in a plane, Nuclear Powered Airplane. Put it in a sub... you get the idea." A couple of weeks later the captain returned and said, "Well the ship and the sub are taken. But the plane... Its yours!".
Funny thing about the incident is, the Government would buy all these patents back from the scientists for a nominal sum of 1$. So the captain made Feynman sign it over to the government. Feynman demanded his dollar. The captain said, it was just a formality. But Feynaman stood his ground. "I want my dollar." So the captain, out of frustration, just gave him a dollar out of his pocket to get it over with. Actually setting up the paper work to collect 1$ from the government would have been too much of a hassle. So Feynman did what he always does. He bought donuts (for lot more than a dollar I assume) started going around the lab saying, "Have a donut, I got a dollar from the Army for my patent". The lab was full of people who had signed over 40 or 50 patents to the government. They all started pestering the captain for their dollars. And Feynman had a hearty laugh at the captain.
Most of these patents do not strike me as non-obvious at all. Just "do the same old thing, but now with computers!" and apply for a patent.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I bought into Tivo early with my series 1. Added a bigger drive. bought the lifetime sub. Bought half a dozen tivos for friends. Got the ethernet card from 9thtee
Then you dropped me like a bad habit. Lots of bugs. Missing features. Other things. How hard would it be to task a few guys with updating the series 1 code and releasing a new rev? Hell, I'll even pay $50 for a huge software update at this point. But nooooooooooooooooo. I got dropped. Moved on. Told to hop on the hampster wheel.
And, you started "making deals". It wasn't "TV my way", it was "TV with some strings, just fewer". Go back to screwing the cable company and building awesome technology, and the revenue will come back.
The rumors of Slashdotter's technical skills are greatly exaggerated.
That old laptop is unlikely to include a TV tuner and even if you try to buy a tuner card, it may not be compatible with the old laptop. Are we supposed to make the tuner out of the bananna and roofing nails?
Technology was not being developed because the people with the power did not want it ruining their business. (i.e. TV and cable/satelite tv execs)
Finally, innovative customers risked their own hard earned cash and developed the technology.
It immediately became a huge success. A new word was formed - to tivo it.
Finally the cable execs realized that they were losing business so they used their installed monopoly on black boxes to take over the business. They tried hard to ignore the copyrighted new word and replace it with "dvr it". Too bad dvr has no vowel.
The innovator that created the business could not compete with the installed monopoly base of black boxes. They tried to pass laws to let them sell the black boxes, but the cable companies effectively weakened those laws. They got destroyed not because they did not have a superior product but simply because of the monopoly factors (i.e. I can buy a Tivo but I still have to pay the cable company to rent a cable box - why pay twice?)
This is why patents exist - to protect the profits of the inventors that actually took the risks and created the product from the slimy large businesses that come in after the product is created and steal customers away.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Anybody notice the TIVO dvr ad in the upper right hand corner of this thread?
Myth TV FTW!
Free Compaq Deskpro (salvaged from the curb)
Cheap used Tuner card (eBay)
Cheap used Video card (eBay)
Nearly new 160 GB ATA hard drive (Salvaged from dead Macintosh)
Software (Download for free)
Some time messing with software and whatnot.
Bits and pieces (IR Blaster, Bluetooth USB dongle for wireless keyboard, etc)
Cheaper than TiVo and Comcast DVRs by a damn sight and much more functionality.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I was a DirecTV subscriber for years w/ my trusty Series2 DirecTivo. When it was time to go HD I had a choice between leaving DirecTV to get cable service or leaving my Tivo. Since the reason I couldn't use a Series3 device w/ DirecTV was because they didn't implement CableCard, it seemed to me that DirecTV was trying to completely control their marketplace (i.e. you must buy our hardware -- which BTW won't be useful for anyone but us). 1. When given a choice, I will not support that business model as it works against my interests 2. My TV experience is more about my DVR than it is about my provider. While I find the increasing amount of advertising very frustrating on my Tivo, it still beats the competition. We left DirecTV and have never looked back.
Evolution: love it or leave it
I'm disappointed that TiVO has made some spectacularly bad decisions in their business dealings, but for me, they still make a better mousetrap.
I've done my own DVR, had a Cox (SciAtl 8300) DVR, and now, DirecTV's abortion of a solution. (Just bought a farm where cable is apparently unavailable FOREVER, due to the location and population density)
The device/service I still own and love is my TiVO HD. It just works SO much better and more reliably than anything else I've got or built. The NetFlix, Amazon, and YouTube on-demand stuff is nice and used a LOT. I live 10 miles from the closest video store, so those features have real value for me.
Plus, TiVO's customer service people and website are FAR superior to DirecTV and Cox.
Last night, we had a big rain come through. "Searching for satellite" was the only thing on DirecTV. My TiVO unit, connected to a Terk HD antenna, enabled us to watch local stations until the storms passed. Plus, my DSL stayed up (it's iffy out in the sticks on a GOOD day), so I watched part of a movie on NetFlix via the TiVO.
IF, and I'm doubting it a lot, TiVO and DirecTV actually release a TiVO'd satellite box this fall, I'm moving to that BECAUSE of the TiVO software/service.
FWIW.......
I am my own gestalt.
I'm on my third tivo, but unfortunatley it's going to be my last.
My first Tivo I loved, and I wore it out.
My second Tivo was fine, but I started wanting to be able to record two shows at once and a few other features, so I gave it to a friend and switched to MythTV. MythTV was great, but the box required occasional maintenance (software updates, reconfiguring the data source, etc) and it didn't recover well from the occasional power outage, so I tried EyeTV on my mac. That was awful (worked fine but made my mac slow as molasses in vermont in january) so I decided to buy another Tivo.
The new dual tuner Tivo was fine, but two months after I got it, my cable company informed me that they were switching to all-digital service and that I would have to get - and pay for - a cable box. As they were already charging me the limit of what I was willing to pay, I decided to cancel my service and use purchased TV downloads instead for a while and see how I liked that. Ok, no big deal, I could put the Tivo on ebay. So I called to cancel my Tivo service... and they said no. It seems that somewhere in the fine print when I signed up for service, they said I had to agree to a year of service on the unit, and so they wouldn't cancel it. I would have to find a buyer willing to transfer the service to them and fulfill the remaining contract period. Given that there are plenty of tivos on ebay without such restrictions, I knew that would never fly. So I'm stuck with it until the contract runs out.
If that's how Tivo wants to treat their customers, I have no desire to be one of those customers. If I ever get cable or satellite again, I'll go to the effort of maintaining the mythtv box again.
> TiVo seeks a repeat DISH Network performance in going after AT&T (T)
> and Verizon (VZ) for infringement. Basically, TiVo's current business
> model appears to be ad sales and patent trolling.
A patent troll allows big businesses to get entrenched in using the patent, then slams them with a lawsuit, leveraging the phenomenal costs (and delays) of stopping using the patent against a settlement for a large, but lesser, sum.
Which is bad in many cases. But here?
Assuming TiVo has a legitimate patent for their primary concept, what I really question is AT&T's "business model" of "let's use TiVo's patent, which was upheld, and hope they don't sue or we will be able to defend ourselves".
Or just planning to pay TiVo through the nose should TiVo sue, [b]as a cost of doing business for AT&T".
So given the real possibility AT&T (and others) proceed deliberately down this dangerous path, I can't fault TiVo for "waiting around" for AT&T's DVR business to grow large before bringing it up as an issue.
It has nothing to do with the validity of the patent (much less the propriety of it, so dear to the hearts of Slashdotters) and everything to do with large companies playing a multibillion-dollar game of chicken.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...is pretty good, from what Tivo's lawyers tell me.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
If the term 'patent troll' is to have any worthwhile meaning there is no way it could be applied to TiVo. Patent trolls are not in the business of creating, designing and selling products and services. They either acquire patents by purchasing them or by applying and sitting on them. When someone else creates and sells something that can be construed to somehow be related to one of the patents, that company is threatened with extended expensive litigation.
TiVo, more than any other company, created the DVR. Replay TV was also a factor but they were sued out of existence by the entertainment cartel. It is also worth noting that TiVo did much more than just recreate the VCR with a hard drive rather than analog tape. Insofar as that product/service is patentable I see no reason to view them as trolls for defending those patents. I think the trolls in this case are the quasi monopoly cable companies that mysteriously 'own' their subscribers and use that guaranteed income stream to steal ideas from innovators with the implicit threat of endless litigation funded by the monopoly rents they are guaranteed.
I don't think TiVo knows what kind of lawyers that they are about to go up against. Both AT&T and Verizon have legal teams that could take TiVo and shred them to pieces. Dish Network was easy to win against, AT&T and Verizon are going to be a lot harder to win against, that is if they even win.
I'll add my voice to the chorus. TiVo is not a patent troll, and the article submission borders on slander. The very definition and reason for getting a patent is to give you rights to an idea and allow you to sue others who use that idea without permission. That is exactly what TiVo is doing. If they had no product and just a portfolio of patents, and only sued people for license fees, then yes, they would be a troll. But that is not the case and not at all what is going on here.
http://support.tivo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/130
"A Fixed format does not preserve or optimize the output based on the video signals, but it eliminates any delay or screen flicker associated with switching formats."
As for channel-switching performance ... I've found that channel-switching performance annoyingly slow on *every* QAM (i.e. digital cable) tuner. Of all the faults unique to the HD TiVos (and there are a good number), slow channel-switching is not one of the ones for which TiVo deserves any blame.
TiVo shouldn't have gotten patents on digital video recording and time shifting in the first place; at the time they got the patent, it was already an obvious application of digital recording technologies and one of the intended applications of digital video compression.
The only reason TiVo was successful was because they started shipping around the time when the decrease in disk storage costs made this kind of device feasible.
> I see. On your PC that you bought from Best Buy 11 years ago... [blah blah deleted]
I had a video capture card in 1994.... with Linux support. The only reason I didn't build a PVR was it didn't capture in MPEG so the files were either very large or crap, software encoding was way too slow and hard drives weren't nearly big enough to be practical. But I certainly had the notion that using a computer instead of a VCR for timeshifting TV would be a good idea that would soon be practical way back then when I did my first capture.
TIVO didn't invent any of the stuff that made a PVR possible. They didn't invent big drives, they didn't invent MPEG, they didn't invent hardware MPEG encoder/decoders. They didn't invent the Internet or putting TV schedules on a computer. They certainly didn't invent software to schedule or resolve conflicts.
Seeriously, what the hell do you DO with an MPEG encode/decode chip other than store and playback video? As soon as that existed and hard drives big enough to store a few hours were affordable and quiet enough to make it practical the PVR was a forgone conclusion.
Democrat delenda est
This is NOT trolling.
TiVo largely invented this whole category, with a fantastic product, and was screwed over by a bunch of companies that developed competing technologies and used their market share and tying to basically "kill off" TiVo.
I know plenty of people my parents age that go into Cox cable and ask for a "Tivo" and come out with a Cox-branded DVR and don't know the difference. And TiVo has to try and subsist on $9.95/month for a product that was category creating, while the subscribers get something that is a crappy copy but included with the service provider. TiVo owns patents on much of the technlogy, and the companies should LICENSE it. They chose not to.
So no, this isn't a patent troll. There are exactly 2 criteria for being a patent troll:
1) Have few if any real products based on what you have patents on (OR, just buy other peoples' patents)
2) Sue in Eastern Texas
If both of these are met, THEN it's definitely a patent troll. Does TiVo met either of these?
Tivos suck so badly for what you pay that they now have to sue people into buying them. The worst part is the ongoing fee for channel guides, and the way they bow and kiss ass about deleting programs (remember the heat that Amazon got for deleting a couple books off of the Kindle?) that the Tivo owner wants to save, and forcing you to endure commercials, even if accelerated, instead of providing either true commercial skipping, or a 30-second forward jump button standard. This is all due to a lack of competition in the DVR industry and Tivo's attitude of take us and all the after sale garbage we can load onto your system any time we want to, or do without. Tivo never should have been allowed the patents they now claim because there's nothing all that innovative there. Patent troll isn't bad enough to describe them these days.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
TiVo's #1 problem is that they're too d@mn expensive.
Yes we know we're being ripped off badly by TiVo because other people clearly build functional DVRs at far lower prices. Nobody avoids TiVo because they don't cost enough.
Putting up with TiVo is like a world where Apple somehow has sued WinTel out of business.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not exactly. TiVo basically sawed the magnetic tape part off of a VCR and waited until hard drives became fast enough, large enough, cheap enough to weld one of them in its place, then tried to prevent anyone else from doing the same thing. As a patent, this fails the obviousness test and they don't deserve these patents merely for waiting for technology to catch up to the need. And if they didn't overcharge so badly for their product and service they wouldn't have left the door so widely open for so much competition.
If you like being ripped off on price because you think your product is so much cooler, go out and buy Apple -- Steve Jobs needs a new jet. And if you like being screwed over by TiVo, who change the functionality of their product after you purchased it, by all means support them. They will have to be the very last option before I will consider buying one -- not because of that fact that their product is shitty (it isn't, just expensive and subject to new functionality limitations after the purchase), but because of how they treat you after the purchase and their attempt to kill all competition, some of which provides features that TiVo intentionally disables for non-technical reasons.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It seems that no one here understands TiVo's patent.
TiVo's main patent (6233389) covers a method for offloading the main MPEG-2 parsing requirement from the CPU to a dedicated DMA/parsing IC.
The separate IC operates independently of the main CPU, using DMA to store the MPEG2 stream in memory.
It also handles indexing the content so that seeks can occur quickly to any point, without requiring the stream to be parsed.
All of this means that you can use a cheap, slow CPU instead of a more expensive faster CPU.
That seems pretty innovative to me.
And beancounters want them to go for the big demographic.
So they race all the way to the lowest common denominator, chasing Jenny Housecoat and Joe Sixpack.
Both of whom could stretch themselves to something more cerebral or less immediate in its satisfactions, but "focus groups" aren't written to see what new could be done, but what's SAFE. The Joe Sixpacks et al ARE more intelligent than the marketdroids give them credit for. It's less *comfortable* outside the designed demographic, so given the option, they won't go there.
But lowest common demominator doesn't alienate them or even the majority who include slashdotters. Well, not to a huge extent, anyway. Because sometimes "Married with Children" really is quite entertaining. It's only when that sort of thing is the only choice you get pissed off.
And TV is socially demanded, so you can't just turn the bastard thing off, so you have it on and don't watch it.
And it really does get to the crux of the matter. The content delivery companies have blocked TiVo (and others) from actually implementing the best features and providing the most usable product. Cable card? DTV smart cards? They're so fucking paranoid about theft of service that they are ruining the consumer experience.
I say fuck 'em all.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
All of you ignorami out there whining 'TiVo is a patent troll!' need to drop it, to avoid embarrassing yourself further. First off, 'patent troll' was invented by large companies that prefer to infringe than license, and has been extended by the media and other ignorant people to anyone actually seeking to enforce their rights, including companies like TiVo that actually build products. I am, however, willing to listen to anyone calling TiVo a patent troll, provided: 1) They invent and patent something 2) They see large, deep pocketed companies use said patented invention to steal market share, and 3) They lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year because of such infringement. Anyone who does that and still believes Tivo is a 'troll' deserves to be heard. The rest of you can return to your basement bedroom in your parent's house.
The quote about "at an unhurried pace" was not about innovation at all if you follow the link. It was about fixing a particular issue, which has nothing to do with innovation. Tivo has definitely innovated more than any other DVR I have seen. The person posting this obviously doesn't like Tivo for some reason, or has it out for all patents in general. I think it is pretty obvious Tivo has had its patents stepped on by the big players in the industry.
I think TiVo claiming on their patents is just good business. I mean you have to admit it's fair play. Also, TiVo is an innovative company. They were ahead of the curve when it came to Digital Video Recording. Who's to say they won't be ahead of the curve on the next generation of Television?
Sir, I respectfully beg to differ - you are confusing TiVo with the SCO Group, headed by their troll-in-charge, Darl McBride.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels