[Josh] So TiVo wins a round in court. It sued and beat Echostar on patent infringement. For TiVo lovers' this is poetic justice, but what's likely to happen now?
- More litigation with Echostar.This is America, where anyone can sue anyone for anything. Echostar is not giving up. They'll take it to the next round, or settle for less than the ruling if they can get away with it.
- More litigation with everybody else. Look for TiVo now to sue Motorola, Cisco (Scientific Atlanta), and Time Warner Cable. And look for those companies to settle, paying TiVo a fee for every DVR. Tivo's patent is very basic, on the fundamental technology behind hard-disk based recording. With these suits, everybody waits to see which way the precedent indicates that things are headed -- when they know, they will settle. We might also see other patent holders including Replay TV and Pause technology come out the woodwork seeking royalties.
- A bid to get TiVo ads into other DVRs. TiVo wants more than money right now -- it needs relevance. Other DVRs make consumers just as happy (don't bother writing me about how great your TiVo is -- Forrester's consumer data shows other DVR owners love their DVRs, too). But only TiVo has a working, successful system based on DVR ads. It's likely to request implementation of the TiVo advertising system in its settlements -- and if there's revenue to be shared, operators may agree. This would expand TiVo's advertising system beyond a million standalone Tivos and 3 million DirecTV TiVo boxes to millions of DVRs at Time Warner Cable, Bright House, Charter, and Cox.
- No slowdown in DVR deployments. DVR has proven to be extremely popular with consumers and is now rolling out in large numbers from cable and satellite companies. Time Warner will not slow down DVR rollouts for a second given how happy its DVR subscribers are. DirecTV already settled the issue by wrapping the patent issue into its latest negotiation with TiVo. (Comcast is probably immune given its slowly evolving development agreement with TiVo.) DVR will become slightly less profitable if patent payments must be made to TiVo, but its retention benefits will outweigh any costs.
Any lawyers out there that want to weigh in on this one? Or users? Send me a comment.
Technorati tags: Tivo, patents,TiVo patent, DVR, PVR, Bernoff, Forrester
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