According to this press release, the Tivo patent infringement case against Echostar is slowly moving forward with the court denying motions to move the case out of Texas.
According to the press release, Tivo charges that Echostar infringed on it’s “Time Warp” patent:
Key TiVo inventions protected by this patent include a method for recording one program while playing back another; watching a show as it is recording; and a storage format that supports advanced capabilities — such as pausing live television, fast-forwarding, rewinding, instant replays, and slow motion.
As I mentioned before, I’m a layman when it comes to patents, but the “Time Warp” patent seems pretty broad in scope to me. If the patent gets validated with a few court victories, this seems like a big win for Tivo. It also looks like it’s broad enough to stifle other DVR inovation, which isn’t so good for DVR enthusiasts.
CNN Money has an article squashing rumors that Apple will be acquiring Tivo any time soon. Quoted in the article:
“I don’t see any logic in Apple taking over TiVo and I don’t think TiVo is dressing up for a sale right now,” said David Miller, an analyst with Sanders Morris Harris. “This is clearly the most emotional, rumor-driven, highly ephemeral name I’ve ever dealt with.”
If analysts were always right, I’d be retiring on my Webvan stock right now so I take it with a grain of salt along with my brown bag lunch.
Also via Build Your Own PVR.com, SageTV 2.2.7 has just been released which includes some bug fixes and performance improvements.
Via Build Your Own PVR.com, Plextor ConvertX is now supporting the Linux platform with an SDK.
This is a very smart move for Plextor from my point of view, and will likely be a great addition to MythTV. The Plextor guys really working overtime to make this product successful and have formed good partnerships with Divx, SageTV, and EyeTV (for the Mac). Linux just makes the product all the more ubiquitous for DVR do-it-yourselfers.
Also via TVPredictions.com, Netflix announced a new cheaper, $11.99 plan as an option for users. According to the story, the plan will be:
The cheaper, $11.99 plan allows two discs at a time and a total of four per month.
I don’t want to be a naysayer, but I’m not sure this plan will be very successful. I can understand that there likely is a demographic of people who watch one DVD movie a week, but I think many people would find the four movies a month limit not worth the trouble of setting up an account and not having the flexibility of picking a movie at one’s whim.
I think a smarter strategy would have been to have the typical entry level plan (e.g. 3 DVDs at once) start at $11.99 and charge users extra (eg $6) if they take more than four movies out in a month. That gets the people who are resistant to $17.99 a month in the tent to try out the service, and if you believe in the Netflix model (which I do), they’ll quickly turn into full paying members without having to do anything.
PVRBlog has an interesting discussion going on whether Microsoft is violating Tivo’s new patent. The patent in question is the process Tivo uses for auto-reversing a bit after a user fast-forwards to compensate for a user’s reaction time. The comments in the post are pretty interesting to read and add a lot to the discussion.
I’m not a patent expert, but after reading the patent, it seems like the “innovation” of the patent isn’t that it auto-reverses a bit at the end of the fast-forward, but that it records the amount the user corrects manually and fine tunes the auto-correction over time.
It’s unclear to me whether MCE does this, or for that matter, whether the Tivo unit does this.
In case you are asking, yes, I do read more than ThomasHawk.com, but he’s been posting some great stuff on DVR technology lately. Anyway, here’s part 3 of his MCE interview.
Via ThomasHawk.com, EdBott.com has a great comparison of three different DVRs he has in his house: a Series 1 Tivo, a Microsoft MCE computer, and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD. While some may quibble with some of his results, it’s a really good read comparing the products feature by feature.
With the thousands of people who publish video from around the world using BitTorrent and RSS, wouldn’t be nice if there was an application as simple to use as Tivo for monitoring and downloading shows? Videora, developed by Sajeeth Cherian, a university student at Carleton University, is just such an application, and he did a great job simplifying the complex process of finding and downloading video content.
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