TiVo Archives - Page 98 of 149

Interesting News Out of Cable Land

Towards the end of last week, two very interesting pieces of news came out of the cable industry… First, I noticed over on TiVo Lovers that CableLabs has approved a new content protection system using traditional IP networking (in addition to the existing Firewire standard). Megazone speculates that TiVo knew this standard was under consideration … Read more

SDV Keeps On Rollin’

In the next month, Cox will deploy SDV in neighboring Fairfax (VA) county. Multichannel News writes: In Northern Virginia, where Cox has about 240,000 subscribers, the SDV system will go live systemwide in about 30 days, according to Kelso. Later this year, Cox plans to roll out the system in its Phoenix and Orange County, … Read more

New TiVo HD Hits Retail

If you’ve been waiting to buy the new TiVo “lite”, now’s your chance. Purportedly, TiVo’s retail partners are fully stocked – including Best Buy, Circuit City and (as seen below) online at Amazon. We’ll have to wait and see if sales of this lower cost HD DVR have any impact on TiVo’s profit outlook.

…And a DVR in Every Home

I remember when Motorola (yes, my employer) rolled out its first HD DVR years after TiVo and ReplayTV first hit the market. There was some general concern about Motorola being late to the game, but the truth was that DVRs hadn’t really made a splash yet, at least in terms of mass adoption. Today, Leightman … Read more

Lycos Loses ‘Home Court’ Advantage

It looks like TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster will be packing their bags for Massachusetts, after they won the first of many legal scrimmages in their patent defense against Lycos. Lycos has asserted that all three companies have violated patents they own, on âinformation filtering technology.â? The two patents that are at the heart of the case are related to the recommendation services that the companies provide.

After Lycos filed their lawsuit against the trio, ChoiceStream (the company that created Blockbusterâs suggestion service) filed a separate lawsuit, to have the patents thrown out.

In their lawsuit against Lycos, they argue that the patents are invalid because of obviousness and prior art. Because Choicestream filed their own lawsuit in the Massachusettsâ court system, TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster sought to have their case transferred there as well. Iâm not familiar enough with the legal subtleties to know why Lycos originally opposed the motion, but with Lycosâ headquarters in MA, the judge found the request reasonable enough and granted the motion.

$20 Million in Australian TiVo Advertising Deals

Now that TiVo has inked a deal with Seven to launch service Down Under, they’ve begun lining up a number of advertisers: At least 20 big companies have rapidly signed up with cheques of more than $1 million to become “foundation partners” with Seven in the TiVo service. Those fat cheques give the companies early … Read more

TiVo.Com Survey

I was chatting with one of my blogging buddies who mentioned I should check out The 4400. We had caught the first season on DVD and enjoyed it, but I heard or read something that implied the later seasons weren’t as good – and we moved on. However, he said he’s enjoyed all of them… So we’re going to give it a shot and before we miss more episodes, I headed on over to tivo.com for some online scheduling action.

As you can see from the image above, I was hit with a survey. Before getting into the nitty gritty of it, they asked why I was visiting the site. Apparently I gave the wrong answer because the survey abruptly concluded. Bummer.

So what could tivo.com use? We had an interesting suggestion the other day for some badge creation tools that hook into our units and display our top Season Passes and such. I think we could even go a little simpler by displaying our model(s) — though, they should be customizable. Everyone wants to brag about the size of their hard drive, right?

TiVo v EchoStar, Part XVII – He Said, She Said

Speaking publicly on the recent Patent Office decisions… Both TiVo and EchoStar appear to hope for the best while appeasing (or is that calming?) their stock holders via the press. TiVo: “The patent office affirmed the majority of the claims of the patent including two that the jury found that EchoStar infringed,” he said. “The … Read more