The news that Best Buy and TiVo are teaming up to share technology and hopefully pump up each other's sales has led some to conclude that new HDTVs with digital video recording capability are in the offing.
That's highly unlikely.
TiVo, the inventor of the DVR market that has trouble making any profit on it, and Best Buy, the giant of electronics retail, announced Thursday a new partnership. Best Buy will push TiVo DVRs in its stores, and TiVo will create a special set-top box that Best Buy can sell specifically to push its own advertising at TiVo customers.
We're not likely to see Insignia TVs with TiVo inside.
(Credit: CNET)Then there's this line in the press release, which appears to be causing some confusion: "TiVo intends to work with Best Buy's Exclusive Brands group (e.g., Insignia, Dynex, etc.) to explore integration of its user interface, search, and other TiVo benefits to help further grow that consumer electronics line."
Some are interpreting that to mean TiVo will drop its DVRs into Insignia and Dynex TVs. But that's not what it says. The release carefully words that section for a reason. In an interview, TiVo Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Joe Miller downplayed that part of the deal concerning TVs, calling it "just one aspect." What TiVo will share with Best Buy-branded TVs is its interface, search function, and Internet-delivered content, like on-demand movies from Amazon and Netflix, and YouTube.
But as far as putting TiVo DVRs inside Best Buy's TVs, it's clearly not a priority for TiVo. "We're not ruling it out," Miller said. "But what we're saying here is, what does it take to make the best possible TV experience."
They're not ruling it out, but they're not promising it either. And it's likely because it's not a wise path to follow. TVs with built-in DVRs aren't exactly a new idea. At CES 2005, the Humax with TiVo inside was announced but never made it to market. The LG 42LB1DR, which had a DVR but not TiVo-branded, actually made it to store shelves, but it had a huge caveat: it could only record over-the-air and "clear cable" (QAM) channels or it needed a cumbersome CableCard hook-up. With the former configuration, premium channels such as Comedy Central and HBO weren't available, with the latter you lost access to on-demand programming (and, often, the ability to record one show while watching another). That meant consumers were paying a big premium (versus the same TVs with no built-in DVR), despite getting a hobbled recording experience. Not surprisingly, demand for such DVR-enabled TVs was nil, and they've largely disappeared from the market.
What this is about is increasing sales for both. TiVo has been losing subscribers, and consumer electronics purchases have taken a plunge along with the economy. Miller says the main focus of the deal for both is to sell more TiVos.
"Their goal is to drive as many TiVo subscriptions as they can," he said.
CNET's John Falcone contributed to this story.
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CNET Networks)
TiVo had a very busy July. First, it teamed up with Comcast to make section editor Matt Elliott miss the Wimbledon final. Next, it announced the rollout of streaming YouTube videos through the boxes. Then, its partnership with Amazon.com evolved to include the eventual ability to buy products from advertisers using your remote.
The fun apparently didn't end with July though, as Friday morning at 2 a.m. EDT TiVo pushed out a sizable service update with six new features.
- Play or delete an entire folder This'll let you, um, play or delete an entire folder. Particularly good if you've, say, recorded a marathon of your favorite show and want to watch all the episodes back-to-back without the hassle of actually selecting them as you watch.
- Browse the guide at any time Pressing the program guide no longer takes you out of whatever it is you're watching: live TV, recorded program, or video download.
- Jump forward in the guide Never understood why this wasn't a feature from day one, but you can now jump forward and back 24 hours to find something in the guide.
- Find a station in the guide Can't remember where CNN falls in your guide? Now just type in "CNN" and you can pull it up fast with only the call sign.
- Toggle closed captioning on and off Self-explanatory.
- Review Thumb ratings Lets you pull up a list of all the programs you've rated.
Digital video recorder TiVo is set to release a software upgrade that will let users access YouTube videos on their televisions, the company announced Thursday. The deal with the Google video-sharing site, originally announced in March, is scheduled to start rolling out in a few weeks.
TiVo owners will need a Series 3 or TiVo HD box to be eligible for the software upgrade, which will be further extended in the near future to allow them to log into their own YouTube accounts to access playlists and the like.
It's not terribly revolutionary. The Apple TV box has given owners access to YouTube for over a year now. TiVo already lets viewers watch select online videos and podcasts--but in downloadable form, not streaming form.
And as my colleague John Falcone has put it: now, where's my Hulu box?
This blog was updated at 1:20 p.m. PDT with a statement from TiVo.
A month after an appeals court confirmed that Dish Network's DVR software had indeed violated a TiVo patent, Dish is retaliating with a lawsuit of its own.
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Dish Network)
The Colorado-based satellite TV provider filed suit in Delaware Friday, asking the court to declare that Dish's current DVR software does not violate TiVo's '389 patent.
Dish says in the filing that it updated its software nearly two years ago in response to TiVo's patent violation suit. It wants TiVo to stop making public statements that allege that the current software on Dish's DVRs are still in violation because it's "causing uncertainty in the marketplace for DVRs," according to the court filing.
A TiVo spokesperson said the company had not yet seen the filing, and therefore could not comment.
TiVo is gearing up to dish out Disney movie rentals, as the digital video recorder company expands its lineup of movies from major studios.
Under an agreement with Disney-ABC and CinemaNow, TiVo subscribers can download the movies for 24-hour rental. TiVo expects to offer the Disney rentals later this year to its broadband-connected TiVo Series2 and Series3 subscribers. Price for the service was not disclosed.
The Disney movies will add to TiVo's more than 30,000 titles from Amazon Unbox, Music Choice, and other content providers.
TiVo's efforts come as Blockbuster is reportedly looking at set-top boxes for consumers to stream movies directly to their TV. DirecTV is reportedly cooking something up, as well.
Updated at 11:45 a.m. PDT with Dish Network's statement.
Another court has upheld TiVo's patent suit against EchoStar Communications.
A U.S. Appeals Court on Friday denied EchoStar's appeal on an earlier court ruling that said the company's Dish Network digital video recorders violated a patent held by TiVo. The ruling was first reported by Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection blog.
Friday's appellate court decision comes two years after TiVo's initial victory, in which a court found that EchoStar's DVRs (digital video recorders) "willfully infringed" on TiVo's patented TimeWarp technology. EchoStar appealed the ruling, which awarded $73.9 million in damages to TiVo. It was also upheld by an appeals court in January.
Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo first sued EchoStar in 2004 for selling its Dish Network DVR, which, like TiVo's DVR, allows TV watchers to record one channel and watch another simultaneously.
"We are extremely pleased that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today denied EchoStar's petition for a rehearing en banc, upholding the court's unanimous ruling in our favor on January 31, 2008, in EchoStar's appeal of the district court judgment of patent infringement, full award of damages and an order for the injunction to be reinstated," TiVo said in a statement.
EchoStar said it was "disappointed" by the court's decision not to rehear its appeal. "The decision, however, will have no effect on our current or future customers because EchoStar's engineers have developed and deployed 'next-generation' DVR software to our customers' DVRs," the company said in a statement. EchoStar said the updated software has been delivered to its customers and that none of the DVRs currently infringe on TiVo's patent, and promised that customers will see no interruption in service as a result of the ruling.
EchoStar, which has since changed its name to Dish Network, said it plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A new report on the tech habits of women shows that the female of the species is edging out the male in the areas of DVR use and ownership of portable game devices.
The study, done independently by Solutions Research Group, and released Thursday, was undertaken to explore the "digital lifestyles" of American women. Data was collected from more than 2,000 respondents between October 2006 and February 2008.
What the final tally shows is that women are as comfortable with popular consumer technology as men (not really a surprise), and that they're making significant inroads into the gaming lifestyle, which has long been dominated by men.
Women who own DVRs spend more than half of their TV viewing time watching time-shifted content.
(Credit: TiVo)For example, SGR characterizes women who own DVRs as much "more enthusiastic" about them than men. That's because women spend 56 percent of their TV-watching time viewing time-shifted content on their DVR. Men spend 42 percent of their time using their DVRs. The discrepancy between the two has much to do with the type of shows men and women watch, according to Kaan Yigit, SGR's director of syndicated studies.
"Men are more likely to watch sports, which has more impact live, obviously," he said. Women are more likely to watch half-hour comedies and 1-hour dramas, he said. Because of those same content preferences, women are also more likely to stream television shows from network TV Web sites.
In the gaming realm, men continue to lead in playing video game consoles--half of all men had played a console game in the previous month, whereas 38 percent of women had--but women are demonstrating a taste for portable game devices. Fourteen percent of women who describe themselves as "gamers" own a PSP (PlayStation Portable), compared to 11 percent of men who are gamers.
"It's a marginal difference, but in every other category, men or boys are slightly or substantially higher, as in the case of Xbox 360 ownership," Yigit said. "We find in general that girls and young women are more likely to skew to (owning) portable units, like the Game Boy Advance for the convenience and portability."
A fall software update from TiVo damaged a popular feature on the company's DVR, and months later the change remains unfixed for a number of customers.
As part of the TiVoToGo feature, software from Roxio called Toast 8 allows users to transfer recorded shows from TiVo to mobile devices, like laptops and iPods, or put the shows on DVDs. The recording and transferring functions stopped working late last year for some customers using Toast.
Users began to complain starting in early October that they were unable to transfer, or burn, any TiVo'd shows at all.
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TiVo)
"Right after my TiVo box informed me that it had received the 'Fall Update,' the problems started," TiVo and Roxio customer Fred Jacobs said.
Roxio said the TiVo fall software update changed the way recorded video files were saved, which introduced technical problems into Roxio's own software.
Roxio issued its own software updates to address the problem in November, but it wasn't a complete fix for everyone. Though the file transfer feature began to function again, hiccups remain for a number of users, like Jacobs.
"When I tried to burn a new episode, the result was a DVD with constant audio breaks and skips, like someone was turning the sound on and off every half-second. Worthless," Jacobs told CNET News.com. "Also, I now have no way to archive my own shows on DVD. I just have to delete them, sometimes before I even have time to watch them. After five months of this, I just feel like a sucker."
Doug Gordon, who initially reported the problem on TiVoCommunity.com, the popular message board for TiVo customers, said he's experiencing the same syncing problem, and the November update from Roxio didn't solve the problem.
"The audio delay is variable, from barely noticeable to (more often) a second or two of delay between the audio and the video," Gordon told News.com. " I've more or less given up on burning programs to DVD now, as most of the ones I've made using Toast since the last 8.0.3 update are unwatchable due to the lack of synchronization."
Roxio admits there are problems with its Toast and Popcorn software. Roxio product manager Patrick Nugent says the company has been working on fixing the syncing issue with TiVo. Nugent said he believes it affects "a small number of users."
The reason the problem is not consistent among all Roxio Toast and Popcorn users, he said, is unclear. There "are many factors that cause recordings to be different from one another, such as fluctuating variable frame rate in HD broadcasts, especially around titles and commercial breaks and even differences from channel to channel."
But customers are demanding to know why it has taken so long to address the issue. Roxio says it's because the company had trouble replicating the problem its customers are experiencing.
"It doesn't happen on every file, which made it a little difficult to try and fix," Nugent said. He said Roxio was able to contact a few customers to show them examples of the audio and video being out of sync last fall.
Without any additional updates from Roxio, frustrated customers say they turned to TiVo, starting an e-mail campaign to the DVR maker's CEO, but say they got little to no response.
When contacted for this article, TiVo said the problem is something they are working on together with Roxio to fix.
"It is important to us that all TiVo subscribers using TiVoToGo receive the same great TiVo experience whether they are utilizing a PC or Mac," the company said in a statement to News.com. "It has been brought to our attention that a small subset of customers using Toast 8 have experienced a problem when trying to transfer their shows. We have been working with our partner Roxio and currently have a fix in beta."
When CNET News.com inquired about the issue Thursday, Roxio said that starting that day it would be
"We're currently testing a solution with a number of customers and plan to release a free update broadly through our automatic update notification as soon as it's ready," Nugent said.
When asked why such a delay, a spokesman for Sonic Solutions, Roxio's parent company, intimated that the problem arose at a bad time: the company had to update 9 of its Mac OS X products to be compatible with Apple's November release of its Leopard operating system.
"Generally (customers) are--and should be--frustrated with us that some of their issues persisted," said the spokesman. "But it is a subset of users. We did address a good portion of users' issues. There are some additional issues that we recognize as being an issue, and we're working on (that)."
Users want a fix sooner, rather than later. One TiVo owner of five years who asked not to be identified said the feature provided by Roxio's Toast software is no longer usable, but that TiVo and TiVoToGo are such an integral part of his and his family's routine, he's not interested in simply changing DVR companies.
"Trouble is, the company still advertises the features on their website as though they are still supporting these features," the TiVo user said. "Most of us don't want a rebate. We want our program to work the way it's supposed to."
A federal court upheld Thursday an earlier ruling that EchoStar Communications infringed on a digital video recording software patent owned by TiVo.
The Washington, D.C., court of appeals also agreed with the lower court's award of $89.6 million in damages to be paid to TiVo by EchoStar, which recently changed its name to Dish Network.
Dish plans to appeal the award for damages, the company said Thursday.
The court's decision "will have no effect on our current or future customers because EchoStar's engineers have developed and deployed next-generation DVR software to our customers' DVRs," Dish said in an official statement. The software update went out to customers "several months ago," according to Dish spokeswoman Kathie Gonzalez.
TiVo said it is "extremely pleased" with the outcome.
"Today's ruling is confirmation of the value of TiVo's IP portfolio, which is in addition to the other benefits TiVo has to offer. TiVo can now continue to focus on its goal to drive greater distribution in both its stand-alone and mass distribution efforts," TiVo said in an official statement.
Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo initially sued EchoStar back in 2004 for selling its Dish Network DVR, which, like TiVo's DVR, allows TV watchers to record one channel and watch another simultaneously.
Update 12:00 p.m. PST: This blog has been updated with more details, as well as comments from Mike Fidler and Greg Gudorf.
If you were eagerly anticipating Digeo's Moxi Multi-Room HD digital media recorder, don't hold your breath.
The Kirkland, Wash.-based company revealed significant changes Tuesday, including the cancellation of two previously announced product lines, the Multi-Room HD DMR and the Moxi Home Cinema Edition DMR. As a result of slashing those products from its lineup, nearly half of its staff will be laid off, and current Chief Executive Mike Fidler will be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Greg Gudorf, the company said Tuesday.
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Digeo)
In an interview with CNET News.com, Fidler blamed the shift in strategy on the company's "inability to deliver some products on time" and "dynamics that occur in the marketplace."
The canceled products were in various stages of production, from pre-production to beta testing with customers, though none was produced in volume yet, said Gudorf.
"As we assessed our situation, it became clear that the best action for Digeo was to focus our work on the next-generation product for the retail market," Gudorf said in a statement. "Building the software and hardware for this category is a complex endeavor, with dynamic technical standards, regulatory issues, and content considerations. Previously, we were spreading our energies across too many platforms."
Digeo will focus on, and still plans to release, the Moxi HD DVR for Cable sometime later this year. Gudorf will take over as chief executive "very soon," according to Fidler, who will stay on as long as necessary to help with the transition. Fidler says he chose to step down on his own.
This is a big shift for Digeo, which acquired the Moxi brand when the two companies merged in 2002. Though the Paul Allen-backed company made a big splash with Moxi's vast feature set at the Consumer Electronics Show that same year, the Moxi DVR was never available to retail customers directly--a la TiVo--and instead was only available from a handful of cable companies. Digeo will still release future retail products, as well as continue its cable relationships, Gudorf said.
