Patent Office rejects some of TiVo's patent claims, battle vs. DISH to rage on
By Richard Lawler 
posted Aug 5th 2009 9:04AM
posted Aug 5th 2009 9:04AM
You knew it couldn't be over, right? The long running TiVo vs. DISH / Echostar patent case took a not-so-new twist yesterday when the Patent and Trademark Office issued a preliminary finding rejecting some of the claims of its Time Warp patent. While DISH was pleased, considering the PTO's conclusions as "highly relevant" to its ongoing appeal, TiVo issued a statement calling this step "not unusual" pointing out that the exact same thing happened when its patent was reexamined in 2005 (and subsequently upheld in 2007,) and that the next step in the process is where it will be able to present its explanation for the first time. All you need to know is that it will still be a while before anyone involved (except the two company's lawyers) are cashing any large checks, or gets their DVR taken away.[Via Multichannel News]
Read - TiVo Statement on Developments in Lawsuit Against EchoStar
Read - DISH Network and EchoStar Statement Regarding Tivo
All the Patent Office did was say that there was reason to disallow. It changed nothing and ONLY NOW does TiVo get the opportunity to defend their patent. Note that very often the Office ends up upholding the patent. This is boring lawyer stuff, not anything meaningful.
In particular, the patent remains in force and Echostar remains an intentional infringer.
Aw! But, I love my ViP 722!
Please don't take away my precious!
Dish Network and Tivo users were either oblivious to the entire case because they have never heard of it, or they yawned because they have been hearing about the victories and losses for years now.
Wake me up when it affects anyone.
off topic slightly... but the world needs a new tivo. tivo was amazing when it first came out - one of the most significant improvements to home video ever. As big as color television over black and white.. or the real internet in my pocket.. and I was a very early adopter of it. But tivo's UI hasn't changed since that day. They're still slow as molasses and very 'texty'. Someone needs to come along with a new box that totally reinvents it. I thought moxi was maybe it, but it's too darned expensive, and i'm not sure it's enough of a reinvention. You'd think apple could do it but they're too greedy to allow you to record television that you're already paying someone else for... they'd want to skim some off, add weird drm, take it two steps backwards. We need something new that considers everything, moving clips to other devices, in box editing, freedom of play, loads of storage, peer sharing, etc.
But Tivo is like fonzie.. so cool like 25 years ago.. but now he's just an old guy hanging out in the bathroom.
(no offense to Henry Winkler, for whom I have much respect)
Tivo is still the best you can get. I do agree, they need to innovate and update more. Adding in Netflix and Amazon support, swivel search, videocasts are the highlights of the past decade with them. While appreciated many of the things you listed should have been done by now. It blows my mind that they haven't even come up with a cheap $30 remote video device that you can hook up to other TVs around the home that use your Tivo as a proxy. Moxi does this already, why not Tivo? How about DNLA upnp media server compatibility already?
As far as the GUI, I love it text based, but I would love it sped up, and be able to scale to HD resolutions better.
I love my Tivo and probably wont use anything else, but I do want to see improvements.
They really need a new box with the ability to do Networked Media Tank type streaming from Windows Home Server, the usual recording duties, and have an open source GUI development with in house control of the kernel and an "official" GUI that they push out with kernel updates. Let the horses run.
PS, the new box should have an actual processor and Gig Ethernet. They sell millions of these, it's not like they can't just use an AMD or Intel low end x86 or even x64 processor and off the shelf chipset. Give us a box with some headroom and let us loose.