[mythtv-users] TiVo's Future May Hinge on Patent Case

Steven Adeff adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com
Fri Apr 7 15:27:23 UTC 2006


On 4/7/06, Marco Nelissen <marcone at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> >On 4/5/06, Marco Nelissen <marcone at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> >> >And of course your satellite/cable operator would never even *think*
> >> >of passing that additional cost along to you, the customer. They
> >> >would obviously absorb that additional overhead by reducing the CEO's
> >> >salary and benefits.
> >>
> >> There are many ways this could play out. It's possible that Echostar
> >> isn't actually any better off financially by having rolled their own
> >> solution. I'm sure they planned to, but that doesn't mean that that's
> >> how the project turned out. Or maybe it wasn't so much about the money,
> >> but about owning and controlling the product. It's also possible that
> >> the increase in cost would be so small as to not make it worth losing
> >> customers over, and so they might in fact absorb that cost.
> >
> >It could also be possible that Echostar's solution is, ahem, better
> >than TiVo? When I was still living in NH, I looked into Dish and
> >specificly their DVR and most of what I read on satelite/cable forums
> >was that people prefered the Dish DVR to TiVo overall.
>
> You must have been in opposite-land at the time :)  From everything I've
> heard, Tivo is far superior to the Dish DVRs, which have a clunky UI and
> are prone to crash (or so I hear, both on forums and from acquaintances).

I dunno, this was from more than one person, more than one source. I
did use it briefly at RadioShack as well at the time and found it to
be much more responsive than the DirecTivo and had some nice graphics
and styling as well. It also appeared to do the Dish version of Season
Passes. Possibly newer than ones you used?


> > Apparently this
> >is just for the newer one as Dish's first few DVR attempts were pretty
> >pitiful, but this newer one apparently got it right overall.
> >
> >But competition in the business world is a bad bad thing and we should
> >be happy companies sue each other out of existance...
>
> The article sure didn't make it sound like tivo was trying to sue echostar
> out of existence. And if they *were* trying, they should go for a larger
> settlement. $100 million is not going to put a $13 billion company out
> of business.

no, but they are trying to take them out of the DVR business...

--
Steve


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