[mythtv-users] tivo patents cover mythtv?

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 06 March 2010 03:26:38 pm Nick Rout wrote:
>
>> But I am guessing that's not a big chunk of tivo's market share. We
>> have only just got a tivo service in NZ, but in the US it seems to
>> have joined electrolux and xerox as a generic term, so I am guessing
>> it has pretty darn good penetration.
>
> I understand that TiVo has yet to make a dime of profit. They seem somewhat
> desperate, if you call to cancel service the first thing they will do is offer
> to cut the price in half to try and keep you as a customer. That is not the
> action of a company with "pretty darn good penetration".

True, but a company in trouble looks for every way it can to maximize
its value if it needs to get sold to someone larger. If the patents
are solid then someone looking to enter that market (Any company from
British Petroleum to NetFlix) would likely pay more money.

If the patents aren't solid then none of this matters.

<SNIP>
>
> So TiVo probably has correctly identified their main problem as the CATV/SAT
> companies. I guess that does give them something in common with many Myth
> users.

They want royalties in the U.S. from Verizon, Time-Warner, Comcast
right? Myth is meaningless in terms of keeping them alive.

I would still contend that as long as Myth has a defensible
'BitTorrent' type argument as to why it exists (and I'm not sure it
does but something for readers to think about, playing DVDs,
YouTube/Hulu files, etc.) and that time shifting TV is only one thing
it does, and then only if the end-user buys the hardware and sets it
up, then it falls to Tivo to sue every individual using Myth and not
an individual company. It's pointless. They won't do it. We're not
sharing TV recordings like the RIAA saw with BitTorrent and stolen
music and movies so there's no great intellectual property issue with
the content providers.

Cheers,
Mark