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

Marco Nelissen marcone at xs4all.nl
Fri Apr 7 15:03:48 UTC 2006


>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).

> 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.


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