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Tivo Gets $215 Million Patent Settlement From AT&T
symbolset writes "Slashgear is reporting that Tivo has achieved a settlement in their patent lawsuit with AT&T. Tivo will receive the minimum sum of $215 million over six years — more if AT&T DVR subscribers go above a certain level. This settles a patent dispute going back to 2009 and has been covered here with some side issues. Confirmed by Tivo press release."
Doesn't matter since there won't be traditional TV in 10 years.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Great for Tivo. Will they just partner up with DirecTV again? They had just about the perfect combination of DVR and service (Tivo DVR + directly recording the digital stream). Every other DVR I've used is a poor imitation. Tivo partnering up again has been teased about for years, but it all comes up to naught.
...Tivo will receive the minimum sum of $215 million over six years...
Tivo still thinks they'll be around in six years?
Proverbs 21:19
I've always liked TiVo products - I've bought a number of them over the years (my mom loves it!). I was one of those who "won" a Series 1 way back when; their system screwed up an awarded almost everyone who entered a free TiVo.
But TiVo as a company has always worried me; their stock has generally been week; and they haven't really innovated much beyond the original DVR.
OK, it's cool that they have a 4-tuner model, but how many times do I really have that many conflicts? Especially with today's cable networks rebroadcasting shows after 3 hours for the west coast?
After years of tivo ownership i've come to the conclusion that TiVo's future is based on their patents.
So far they've released 2 new model TiVos that are no faster than their model built and designed right around windows 95.
They haven't even looked at the competition to see what works on other DVRS. (they got pnp 2 years ago. The guide still doesn't show if a show is recording)
The kicker: if my TiVo dies, I have a monthly contract with TiVo that I have to cancel. This is when they try to upsell you to their slower "new" model.
The average TiVo owner is tech savy. Savy enough to know that TiVo gave up on their hardware and is concentrating on other means of income (see parent/patent article).
An obsolete company takes a bite out of an evil company using a bullshit process.
Big news I guess, but I'm extremely meh on this one as I'm apethetic about all the players, technologies, and issues at hand.
What they need to do is make the cost of licensing the Tivo UI and scheduler to be roughly the same as the annual pay-out for the patent royalties. Still If AT&T has paid out, I wonder who's next?
I won't be paying for cable TV, nor will any of my brothers. If the cable companies don't adapt and fast, they will die out with our parent generation. It's not so much that they're using the wrong technology, but rather that a similar but cheaper option is available. Internet can just as easily do phone, radio, and TV as well generic data. Adapt or die, content providers.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
My latest... no, my last purchase of a TiVo was the Premier with lifetime service. The unit is riddled with bugs.
I never expect them to get the second CPU core enabled. It is short of RAM. It bogs down. It ignores the remote for a while when you sit back down in front of the couch (which I suspect is because the OS swap out the remote control's handler process during a memory shortage). It crashes. It has a bare-bones Netflix interface that likes to crash. The high definition user interface is STILL incomplete, with many screens dropping back down to standard definition. The Amazon Video interface can't do free Prime movies. Only purchases. The non-discrete directional buttons on the remote makes for regular menu selection mistakes. If your Internet connection goes down, your locked out of much of the unit's functionality until you return.
I could go on and on about all the problems with their product. And I see that other people have their own observations. TiVo isn't in the game of producing a product/service that consumers want. We are actually just what they're selling. Collecting eyeballs for add space. And then adding bullet points for new features with minimal functionality and playing the patent race game.
Admittedly, the only good thing to come out of them recently was the iPad TiVo remote control. Nicely done. But then, they weren't doing it for their customers, I'm sure, as much as they were trying to beef up their patent portfolio, probably vs Apple.
If TiVo dies tomorrow, I won't be sad. I'll go back to the cable company's DVR and I'd enjoy it. Having all the pre-paid hardware and service is the only thing keeping me holding on. TiVo once put the customer first, but they lost sight of us. Too bad. These days, TiVo owners don't make great evangelists for their product.
Now if they can just resolve the CCI-bit issues, those of us that are Tivo users will once again be happy. Cable companies are exploiting customers by not allowing DVR devices to transfer in-between them (CCI-bit 0x02) and cite federal laws for doing so. And yet, they ignore those federal rules in order to offer identical multi-room-viewing products.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
In this day and age of overly broad patents and frivolous lawsuits, this case decision is actually justified.
TiVo was THE first to develop and market the DVR way back when it you would "TiVo" your favorite shows instead of using that piece of modern archeology called a VCR. Soon after TiVo's initial success, the knock-off competitiors really diminished the TiVo's success.
I even like that they get a bump in cash payments when AT&T gets more subscribers.
Now if some company would come along and make it easy for me to off load my recordings to my personal harddisk we would have fully replaced the VCRs capabilities. I hate losing my recordings if my STB goes out and simple storage expansion would be nice.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Something similar to what iTunes has done with music would be appropriate.
We can discuss this further once iTunes does with movies what it has done with music.
but modern TVs (and DVDs etc) can already feed off an IP-Only solution.
A lot of people don't already own a modern TV or modern DVD player for each room of the house. Less affluent families, for example, are likely to still be using a CRT SDTV and a $40 Walmart special DVD player in at least one room.
Sorry. I disagree that all patent law is unjust.
Your assesment of "easy to replicate" is unsound. It takes massive amounts of engineering and execution to get past the concept stage.
I agree patents were never meant to enfoce a monopoly on such things, but they are meant to protect a new player (TiVo) who enters the market with a new idea from being unfairly steamrolled out of the market by larger established competitiors (AT&T, Dish, Echostar, Verizon).
Give it a rest. Some parts of the patent system work. Some need to be revamped and fixed. Some need to be removed all together. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tivo is no longer customer-focused, their new customers are corporations. I've stopped hoping that someone would buy them and add some life, apparently no one thinks they're worth it. The fact is they're not much but a wet noodle anymore.
Does this mean non-AT&T branded TiVo remotes will now be able to carry a Standby button and users not have to use Slow Up Skip Select to do the same thing reliably?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Actually, ReplayTV was first, but TiVo had several innovations in their second version that made it better than ReplayTV.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
>> I never expect them to get the second CPU core enabled.
I stopped reading after this since if you actually had a TiVo Premiere you'd know the second core was enabled in the 14.9 software update.
As for your other issues: crashes, hanging, etc, I have a Premiere and have rarely if ever seen anything like that.
If your Internet connection goes down, your locked out of much of the unit's functionality until you return.
Including watching previously recorded shows.
Yep. That's cute. If your Internet connection goes down, about the only functionality left is viewing the Network Settings menu.
Of course, when I tried to do that, the unit hard-crashed and I had to unplug it and restart it, and after rebooting, it finally properly reconnected to the wired network that had never gone down.
Admittedly, the only good thing to come out of them recently was the iPad TiVo remote control. Nicely done.
You haven't tried using it much, have you? The TiVo remote control program for iOS is a giant piece of shit. It's a far better UI than the TiVo UI itself is, but it routinely crashes (try scrolling through the guide in it), regularly disconnects from the TiVo, and up until the latest version (according to the change log), would frequently mistake a TiVo Premier for a "Series 3" and disable the majority of its functionality.
The sad thing is that I'm pretty sure the TiVo is still the best DVR available. My mom has a DVR she gets through Verizon, and it's a complete piece of shit, where as the TiVo is only mostly shit.
It's really kind of sad, because if they only put a little bit of effort into bug fixes and polishing their interface, they could have a really system. But they just don't care.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I stopped reading after this since if you actually had a TiVo Premiere you'd know the second core was enabled in the 14.9 software update.
What update? I don't think my TiVo Premiere has ever received a software update.
Or if it has, it's certainly never bothered mentioning it or displaying a changelog, so it's not like I'd know anything about it.
As for your other issues: crashes, hanging, etc, I have a Premiere and have rarely if ever seen anything like that.
Really? Go to Settings, DVR Diagnostics. Enjoy.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I would probably only know that the second core had finally been enabled for non-UI tasks if I had read an unofficial changelog (because TiVo does not produce one) in an unofficial TiVo forum. I believe you mean here:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=480226
I will disregard your underlying message that missing an announcement that never came from TiVo nor actively pursuing an unofficial TiVo forum signifies that one does not actually own a TiVo. That's fanboy behavior. I do, however, congratulate you on your problem-free experience. I don't know how you small minority of users manage it.
Too bad I don't have mod points here. You hit quite a number of points dead-on.
> It takes massive amounts of engineering and execution to get past the concept stage.
This is simply not a valid excuse for a patent.
Tivo gets a free pass on this nonsense because some people are "fans" of the product. This crap shouldn't be excused regardless who does it.
Frankly, any Tivo user should be seriously concerned about the corporate culture behind this kind of activity and what it might mean for the actual product.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Hear hear. I've been a customer of TiVo's continuously since 1999. When one of our two TiVo HD units recently broke, I didn't buy a Premiere ... I bought a used HD with Lifetime. I refuse to buy another box from TiVo until the second CPU on the Premiere is enabled ... which was promised TWO YEARS AGO and never delivered.
I asked @TivoDesign on Twitter about this recently, and her reply was "Working on it". With $200M more money in the bank, maybe they can work on it a little harder now. But I'm betting they won't ... instead focusing on who to sue next.
It's incredibly sad to see a once-thrilling product turn stale and old and broken, and the company turn from innovative engineering into a bunch of lawyers.
Your unfounded and just plain wrong personal attacks on me, don't offer any futher support of your position. In addition, your statements concerning TiVo's "extra value" and "proprietary" hardware seem to ignore the key point that they did in fact advance the technology past the point where it was previously. They made it easy for the mass population to digitally record broadcasting. That is innovation much in the same vein as Apple has done with MP3 players.
Your attempts to divide the entire population into me the ignorant layman and you+world of knowledgable experts in the field are humorous. I applaud your low ./id and I am sure that you are just waiting to unleash your full knowledge of patent law plus technology history in a vitriolic chastisement of my audacity to assume to have an opinon contrary to your own. TiVo agrees with me to the tune of around 3/4 of a BILLION $$$$.
We can agree to disagree on the subject or you can flame me again to get the last word in. I'm having fun with you now.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lets put it this way, do you work for a Cable company?
No, but I do know that some families think in terms of a monthly budget, not a yearly budget. They live paycheck to paycheck and can't spend the equivalent of four months of one of their utility bills to invest in a new Internet-capable TV set. They'll keep the TV they have until it dies and then replace it with a used CRT SDTV from a Goodwill store. I also know that a lot of channels' web sites are "cablewalled", such that you can't watch online until you verify that you subscribe to a traditional cable TV package including that channel. Finally, what's the Internet counterpart to ESPN's Monday Night Football or ESPN's coverage of NCAA football and basketball? At least one family in my small survey sample would rather go back to dial-up than give up televised sports.
I often get mod points here, unfortunately I never get them on TCF.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Again, I like how you stick to the flaming and avoid any useful information to support your arguements.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sad thing is that I'm pretty sure the TiVo is still the best DVR available. My mom has a DVR she gets through Verizon, and it's a complete piece of shit, where as the TiVo is only mostly shit.
It's really kind of sad, because if they only put a little bit of effort into bug fixes and polishing their interface, they could have a really system. But they just don't care.
Yup, this is why I moved to MythTV. I won't say that it is completely bug-free and it is tricky to set up, but now when something goes wrong I have half a chance of being able to fix it myself. The videos are just mpeg files (well, unless you transcode them - for some bizarre reason mythtv still uses NUV for that and the player is REALLY picky about keyframes). Once you get it working it pretty-much runs without a hitch.