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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.
Its not unique. Digital video predates the tivo by decades.
What exactly should be be protecting here?
Already my DVR cannot do a lot of things because of patents. With a Tivo you can fast forward, press stop, and it will jump back a few seconds. Thats a tivo patent.
They are well protected in the market. If anything, this shows us how patents are way too powerful in the modern world. The guy with the best lawyer wins, not the originator or the small inventor.
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.
You can't patent an idea, only an invention or a process. If Mr. Coffee has patents on their coffee maker, it doesn't mean that nobody else can make coffee makers, it means nobody can use their way of making a coffee makers.
My former brother in law worked in a manufacturing plant, and the boss would hand him some gizmo or another and say "can we make these?". If the answer was "yes", they let the lawyers sort it out. Sometimes using bronze instead of copper was enough to get around the patent.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
The moment I saw a Tivo, I knew that I could replicate it with an off the
shelf TV tuner. The only problem was the size of hard drives versus the
size of uncompressed video. This makes something like a Tivo impractical
if you are starting out with a bttv card. A tuner card that does it's own
mpeg2/mpeg4 compression makes implementing something like Tivo possible
with a standard desktop PC and little more than some mangey shell scripts.
Attempts to replicate the Tivo in software started immediately.
If some college kid can replicate your "invention" without seeing any of
the details of your patent then you have been granted a patent on the
"idea" and not the actual implementation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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'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 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
Sort of like they did with CableCARD?
Would that be CableCARD 1 or 2? With or without the commonly used SDV, which was not in the spec?
Motorola and Qualcomm both have no problem with CableCARD.
Motorola and Qualcomm are the manufacturers of the official cable boxes used by Comcast/Time Warner/etc. They have inside information on how to deal with the particular (read: non-compliant) quirks of the cable networks. TiVO doesn't.
The FCC has done a horrible job with standards lately. The analog/digital switchover was a mess. 8VSB modulations sucks compared to COFDM-and they're hacking in "mobile ATSC" to deal with the limitations after-the-fact. I doubt anything will come out of that. They also mandated Firewire on cable boxes-but didn't mandate Firewire on TVs or satellite boxes. The whole thing is a huge mess that could have been easily avoided.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)