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TiVo Time Warp Judgment Affirmed
zapakh writes "A federal appeals court this week upheld a lower court decision that accused DISH Network and EchoStar of continuing to infringe on TiVo patents.' This is a follow-on to a Slashdot story from October. Despite a 'Herculean effort' by EchoStar in redesigning its DVR software, the ruling agrees with the district court that that was not a major redesign of the software. The patent in question is titled 'Multimedia time warping system.' TiVo is pleased with the ruling."
But I kinda recall doing that with my VHS, which had a button on the remote specifically designed to disable its transmitter thus allowing me to watch other TV channels as it recorded a specific channel back in 1990... How come this wasn't used to invalidate the patent?
Pinch more pennies and ditch TiVo for MythTV:
Yes, the MythTV software is free, but how much would you pay for the equivalent TiVo hardware (including remote control) ? I'll go out on a limb and posit that you can't match the TiVo package price for the same form-factor and functionality.
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I don't think you're going to convince anyone here.
TiVo Premiere XL is $499 ,and has about the recording capacity you would expect if you plugged for a middle of the curve HD.
Now for service. $12.95 per month? How long do I intend to use this thing? Let's go for $399 which is for "life of the box" and assume that Tivo never go out of business.
So I get $898 to play with. I need to spend a premium on quiet gear, and slimline cases, PSU etc. Then I can keep it forever, upgrade incrementally, and all the geek chicks will want to come to my place to admire my e-penis.
Not a difficult choice.
there are a few ghetto channels that need a CAM, but I can't imagine anyone caring about that.
If you are a cable company in the US then you care a lot about people stealing your product. And while by law they have to distribute the free to air channels (maybe 10 or so channels) via cable for a nominal fee ($15/mo in my case - which represents the entry cost into getting cable TV), my provider (Comcast) only does that in SD. If I want to see those channels in HD I need to either sell my soul to Comcast or have a CableCard enabled device. I could theoretically get HD over the air, but my local geography is such that I wouldn't get decent reception from the transmitters.
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Pinch more pennies and ditch TiVo for MythTV:
http://www.mythtv.org/
If you're a geek and don't know about it, check it! We need more devices with MythTV preloaded on them.
After several years of MythTV, the final straw was the removal of device support for my PVR-350. My time is simply worth more than the 20+ hours I probably spent over the years upgrading my MythTV box, hand-building device drivers, and dealing with other issues such as loss of audio.
If you value your time, I would suggest MythTV is not for you. I finally retired the box and got a 3-tuner DVR. Proprietary? Yes. (Actually, Linux under the cover, but good luck hacking it.) But it works consistently.