Lorien_the_first_one writes "After years of wrangling, TiVo has won its day in court against Dish Network, formerly known as the EchoStar, when the Supreme Court declined to take up Dish Network's appeal, forcing the satellite television company to pay $104 million in damages. According to the article, 'TiVo originally won a patent infringement case in 2004 against Dish, which was then named EchoStar Communications. It charged that Dish illegally copied its technology, which allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television on digital video recorders.' Despite an injunction, Dish continued distributing its set-top boxes in the belief that the work-around they had implemented avoided infringing TiVo's patents. Now the case goes back to the lower court for review to determine if they did indeed steer clear of those patents."
Or at least fix the damn options to turn tags off. I turned them off when they first came on the scene but now they return even though I haven't changed any options.
If you are looking at the front page, which only shows stories. There's no point displaying the story tag. Similarly if you are filtering submissions on the firehose by any other specific tag.
As someone who still owns two Tivo's (not being used presently), this is a good day for them. At least they will get a bit of cash. Unfortunately my move to DirecTV, and TiVo's change of focus to Cable and OTA only, I have been forced to use the DirecTV DVRs. While adequate, other DVRs are in NO WAY as feature complete.
Direct and TIVO have inked another deal and there will be new HD hardware for Direct from TIVO coming in a year or so. FWIW - I left DISH for Direct to get TIVO and left Direct to FIOS to keep TIVO. Now I'm stuck on COX but I've got my TIVO!
Anyway, hang in there - relief from that POS "DVR" they provided you is coming!
nfortunately my move to DirecTV, and TiVo's change of focus to Cable and OTA only, I have been forced to use the DirecTV DVRs.
That's DirecTV's doing, not Tivo's. Rupert Murdoch shut them out because he thought they could do better in house. Now that Murdoch's gone, they can admit defeat, and are actually working with Tivo to make an DTV HD Tivo, to be released next year.
Tivo invented the DVR, period, and Dish infringing on their patents almost put them under. This is the whole reason we have patents, to let the guy that came up with the idea profit from it without being put under by big pocketed copycats. I'm really glad TiVo won this case.
And yet when anyone else patents a PAINFULLY OBVIOUS feature they are evil. But because it's TiVo they get a pass? I had thought about getting one. I'm passing now. TiVo = geek-friendly patent troll.
Software patents = fail. If the Dish copied some copyrighted code or something, fine. Sue them. But they didn't. They infringed on an idea. Whoopee shit.
DVR is not an obvious invention?!?!? You have to be kidding. It's basically just a MiniDV VCR, but instead of digital tape, they use a digital hard drive. That is a frakking obvious application, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere already had a 1980s-era Amiga recording live television to their HDD.
>>>Tivo allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television
I'm sorry but I don't see how this is any different than a DVD-recorder. It too has pause buttons, rewind buttons, and fast
you = fail. they were specific circuit implementations. i.e., hardware patents. It wasn't just patenting 'a vague method of recording and replaying live video'.
"In 1985, while working at Honeywell's Physical Sciences Center, David Rafner first described a drive-based DVR designed for home TV recording, time-slipping, and skipping commercials. U.S. Patent 4,972,396 focused on a multi-channel design to allow simultaneous independent recording and playback." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder [wikipedia.org]
Looks like Tivo was just copying somebody else's idea. - They can not claim it to be their own.
Also of note: ReplayTV was released the same year as Tivo, and it too can pause or rewind live television via "independent record and playback". Once again, Tivo can not claim first implementation.
Actually, the wikipedia entry is wrong. They Honeywell patent is:
Title: Multiple independently positionable recording-reading head disk system
Abstract ------ A multiple independently positionable recording-reading head optical disk system. The system includes at least one optical disk having an arrangement of data elements. A plurality of recording-reading heads read and write data onto the optical disk. An apparatus for transporting the plurality of recording-reading heads over one side of the optical disk enabling each of the recording-reading heads to read data from or write data onto the optical disk independently of the other recording-reading heads.
--
This is not a TiVo. This is how to record onto optical media with multiple independent read/write heads.
This demonstrates why you should actually verify information in WikiPedia instead of quoting it blindly.
I always assumed the pause/rewind/etc. stuff was a software layer (apparently it is not). I attributed Direct TVs lack of the few second jump back when pressing "play" from fast-forwarding as part a patent issue. I wonder...
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it. some of what they do isn't really obvious either - like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Whenever this story is talked about, and this has been a long running battle, everyone says the patents are "obvious" but honestly I do not think they simply patented something so obvious as the buttons found on a VCR. Instead they patented their circular buffer, the ability to watch while recording and pause without losing anything including audio\video synch. I mean really, if it was so obvious and simple why is it that every other damned commercial DVR out there sucks ass? DISH, FIOS, Direct, and all of the cable DVRs BLOW compared to the TIVO. Why is that if this is all so darned easy and obvious?
TIVO ain't perfect but they pioneered much of this and it's pretty good software. Time they got paid by all those companies that simply copied (poorly) what they did.
P.S. Yeah, I owned one of the competitor boxes that had auto-commercial skip too. A shame THAT got creamed:-(
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Actually it has been obvious for a few decades now:
$man rewind
int fseek(FILE *stream, long offset, int whence); long ftell(FILE *stream); void rewind(FILE *stream); int fgetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos); int fsetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
Hey, I loved my TiVos too (and prefer them to the DirecTV injustice I have to endure).
Seriously, though, the reason TiVo did it first is because back when they did it, 10GB of hard drive space was both huge and expensive. They happened to implement these features _on a hard drive_ first. VCRs could do everything a TiVo could do except during live TV. It's not for lack of want or idea, but the simple fact that they area sequential access medium. One might say that the 7 second tape delay used in radio statio
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
It was called a VCR - it's been around for years
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Again, VCRs did this for years. The intent was to rewind past the point where you hit the button, and the tape that kept going due to the spinning reel inertia.
NOTHING in that patent is new or novel. Changing from analog tape to digial media is an obvious enhancement to the VCR and should never have been granted as a patent.
>>>if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot.
That's not a Tivo "feature" but an MPEG2 bug. Since MPEG2 only captures a full frame every few seconds (on low-bitrate EP mode), the Tivo can not start playing immediately. Instead it must travel backwards along the bitstream until it finds a full frame. This is what causes that slight rewind motion.
My Panasonic ReplayTV does exactly the same thing. Ditto my DVD recorder. Ditto my D-VHS tape, albeit in
No it's not. Every other DVR I've used just stops for a moment when you hit play, and starts from that point - It's physically impossible to get the Time Warner DVR to stop when a show starts back up coming out of commercial.
The process ends up looking like this: FF->FF-> wait a few seconds, oops, it started, hit Play->Rew until you get back to the black interstitial, then Play again.
On the Tivo, when your brain registers "Okay the show's back on", you hit play, and it snaps back about 5 seconds
Is this really a novel technology, or a slapping together of a bunch of existing things in a fairly obvious manner. I mean, really, the very first applications on the internet that allowed streaming video and audio supported pause, rewind, and fast forward. I distinctly remember pushing pause on things to allow the buffer to fill up over a slow dialup line. Sometimes, the slow dialup line would enforce a pause for you.;-)
Other than the fact that it's TV, I don't see this as being any different from real player or a bunch of things which predated it.
This patent really should be vacated, I just can't see how "a buffer with forward and backward access" is actually a novel invention. I'm of the opinion that if you can show any application which streamed multimedia ever had pause etc then the whole patent is invalid.
Being able to pause a live video stream on the home TV? Then fast forward to catch up to the live stream? No one else was doing that in the late 90's.
If I was doing it with any form of media prior to Tivos patent, the ability to buffer and play an incomplete stream as a concept should be void.
You can't take something that someone is already doing, and add "with TV" to it, and expect that "with TV" is magically different from "with a video file on the internet".
As I understand it, if Tivo used a different technique of doing on TV than was used in other media, it's patentable. If Dish used a different technique of doing it on TV than Tivo did, Dish should be okay. But if Dish just copied Tivo's patented technique, then Tivo was right to stomp them.
As I understand it, if Tivo used a different technique of doing on TV than was used in other media, it's patentable. If Dish used a different technique of doing it on TV than Tivo did, Dish should be okay. But if Dish just copied Tivo's patented technique, then Tivo was right to stomp them.
Maybe, but without knowing the details, unless it is more than "patent for a circular buffer with random access", then I just don't get it.
Essentially, once the concept of a buffered stream with pause, rewind, fast forwar
Realplayer (before tivo): video bits get sucked off the internet (which may be digitized in real time on the other end) and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Tivo: video bits get sucked off a video digitizer and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Dish (after tivo): video bits get sucked off a video digitizer and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I fail to see how using a ring buffer to store video is worthy of a patent.
Sure, the notion of fast forward, pause, and reverse is obvious, but the methodology and working device was, at the time, non-trivial it took some work to get it good, and dish network did "steal" their technique.
Now, are all patents bogus? I tend to think so. There is too much historical account of inventors "rushing to the patent office" to beat their competitor. Now, too me, that seems terribly unfair, one will get the benefit of their research, and another will not.
they were specific circuit implementations. i.e., hardware patents. It wasn't just patenting 'a vague method of recording and replaying live video' so yes, they're okay.
Did you even read the post you replied to? Their specific implementation is patented, not the concepts in general. Notice how Comcast, DirecTV, et al have not been sued, despite having set top boxes with those features?
If the specific implementation is not novel or new, then its not valid. I highly doubt that Tivo invented a completely new non obvious method of recording MPEG video streams.
Yes, topposting because the knee-jerk patent-troll comments below are annoying.
The patent: Multimedia time warping system [google.com]
Talks about circular buffers for viewing and recording at the same time, maintaining audio synch, running the clock FWD and back while moving through the data. (borrowing from BLKMGK's comment below [slashdot.org]) Combination of software and hardware (circuit implementation) to get the function working.
NO, your VHS/Betamax player did not have this first, unless it could record the show and play it back at the same time, allowing you to watch different segments of the show while it kept recording. IIRC, Tivo was in negotiations with Echostar/Dish before Dish released a DVR. Tivo let them see a demo unit under NDA. Dish suddenly broke off talks with Tivo, and shortly after came out with their own DishDVR hardware. Sure enough, components infringing on the Tivo patent were found in the hardware.
This kind of crap is exactly what the patent system is supposed to prevent, or at least provide recourse for. The system is working correctly in this case. I'm a Dish subscriber, and love using DVR (even though DishDVR is far inferior to Tivo) because the TV service is the least expensive available where I'm at. It'll be interesting to see if prices change when this settles down.
...and was patented by David Rafner of Honeywell, before TiVO existed.......or you could get a PC based PVR and pay nothing for a tivo alike with more features no restrictions and nor subscription required?
As well as being able to use both heads in playback mode you could use them in record/playback, playback/erase and erase/record.
My system started with both machines with erased disks. It then started recording on machine 1. Once the disk was full it continued recording on machine 2. Once the second disk was full it returned to machine
Talks about circular buffers for viewing and recording at the same time, maintaining audio synch, running the clock FWD and back while moving through the data. To say that they simply patented being able to pause TV is pretty disingenuous!
I short, summary is trolling crap per usual to get everyone up in arms. Real patent is a bit more complex. Granted much of this seems "obvious" now but back when TIVO first did it it was FAR from really obvious. It was going to get done by someone but back then on the hardware available it was pretty slick!
I'm not sure when TiVo first had that feature, but I have a friend who worked as a software engineer on a Sagem DVR that had that feature back in 2000 or 2001, and they believed to be the first to do that at the time.
I don't remember the outcome of it though, I don't think it actually got released to the market.
My favorite sandwich is peanut butter, baloney, cheddar cheese, lettuce
and mayonnaise on toasted bread with catsup on the side.
-- Senator Hubert Humphrey
STOP WITH STORY TAG (Score:4, Insightful)
For $DEITY sake stop tagging stories with story tag or the gets it!
To tag a story with story once is misfortune, to tag a story with story twice is annoying, to do it three its enemy action!
Re: (Score:2)
For $DEITY sake stop tagging stories with story tag or the gets it!
To tag a story with story once is misfortune, to tag a story with story twice is annoying, to do it three its enemy action!
You're right. Obviously, they should tag stories with the "comment" tag and vice versa. Fucking ingenious!
Re: (Score:2)
Or at least fix the damn options to turn tags off. I turned them off when they first came on the scene but now they return even though I haven't changed any options.
Re: (Score:2)
Dish is still Echostar (Score:3, Insightful)
Dish Network is a product. Echostar Satellite LLC is the company. There is no former, only formal.
Go TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
Hang in there! (Score:4, Informative)
Direct and TIVO have inked another deal and there will be new HD hardware for Direct from TIVO coming in a year or so. FWIW - I left DISH for Direct to get TIVO and left Direct to FIOS to keep TIVO. Now I'm stuck on COX but I've got my TIVO!
Anyway, hang in there - relief from that POS "DVR" they provided you is coming!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/03/hell-freezes-over-new-directv-hd-tivo-on-the-way/ [engadget.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
nfortunately my move to DirecTV, and TiVo's change of focus to Cable and OTA only, I have been forced to use the DirecTV DVRs.
That's DirecTV's doing, not Tivo's. Rupert Murdoch shut them out because he thought they could do better in house. Now that Murdoch's gone, they can admit defeat, and are actually working with Tivo to make an DTV HD Tivo, to be released next year.
Re:Go TiVo (Score:4, Informative)
Tivo invented the DVR, period, and Dish infringing on their patents almost put them under. This is the whole reason we have patents, to let the guy that came up with the idea profit from it without being put under by big pocketed copycats. I'm really glad TiVo won this case.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not at all, but the DVR was not an obvious invention.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
DVR is not an obvious invention?!?!? You have to be kidding. It's basically just a MiniDV VCR, but instead of digital tape, they use a digital hard drive. That is a frakking obvious application, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere already had a 1980s-era Amiga recording live television to their HDD.
>>>Tivo allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television
I'm sorry but I don't see how this is any different than a DVD-recorder. It too has pause buttons, rewind buttons, and fast
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry but I don't see how this is any different than a DVD-recorder. It too has pause buttons, rewind buttons, and fast-forward buttons.
But you can't use them while recording, thus the patent.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Informative)
"In 1985, while working at Honeywell's Physical Sciences Center, David Rafner first described a drive-based DVR designed for home TV recording, time-slipping, and skipping commercials. U.S. Patent 4,972,396 focused on a multi-channel design to allow simultaneous independent recording and playback." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder [wikipedia.org]
Looks like Tivo was just copying somebody else's idea.
- They can not claim it to be their own.
Also of note: ReplayTV was released the same year as Tivo, and it too can pause or rewind live television via "independent record and playback". Once again, Tivo can not claim first implementation.
Parent
wikipedia entry is wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the wikipedia entry is wrong. They Honeywell patent is:
Title: Multiple independently positionable recording-reading head disk system
Abstract
------
A multiple independently positionable recording-reading head optical disk system. The system includes at least one optical disk having an arrangement of data elements. A plurality of recording-reading heads read and write data onto the optical disk. An apparatus for transporting the plurality of recording-reading heads over one side of the optical disk enabling each of the recording-reading heads to read data from or write data onto the optical disk independently of the other recording-reading heads.
--
This is not a TiVo. This is how to record onto optical media with multiple independent read/write heads.
This demonstrates why you should actually verify information in WikiPedia instead of quoting it blindly.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They didn't patent rewind/fast forward, and if you think that's what this is about perhaps you should actually read the patent.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not solid state; it's a hard drive.
I always assumed the pause/rewind/etc. stuff was a software layer (apparently it is not). I attributed Direct TVs lack of the few second jump back when pressing "play" from fast-forwarding as part a patent issue. I wonder...
Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it. some of what they do isn't really obvious either - like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Whenever this story is talked about, and this has been a long running battle, everyone says the patents are "obvious" but honestly I do not think they simply patented something so obvious as the buttons found on a VCR. Instead they patented their circular buffer, the ability to watch while recording and pause without losing anything including audio\video synch. I mean really, if it was so obvious and simple why is it that every other damned commercial DVR out there sucks ass? DISH, FIOS, Direct, and all of the cable DVRs BLOW compared to the TIVO. Why is that if this is all so darned easy and obvious?
TIVO ain't perfect but they pioneered much of this and it's pretty good software. Time they got paid by all those companies that simply copied (poorly) what they did.
P.S. Yeah, I owned one of the competitor boxes that had auto-commercial skip too. A shame THAT got creamed :-(
Parent
Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Funny)
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Actually it has been obvious for a few decades now:
$man rewind
int fseek(FILE *stream, long offset, int whence);
long ftell(FILE *stream);
void rewind(FILE *stream);
int fgetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
int fsetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
DISH, FIOS, Direct, and all of the cable DVRs BLOW compared to the TIVO. Why is that if this is all so darned easy and obvious?
Maybe they blow because they didn't use TIVO's patented technology?
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, I loved my TiVos too (and prefer them to the DirecTV injustice I have to endure).
Seriously, though, the reason TiVo did it first is because back when they did it, 10GB of hard drive space was both huge and expensive. They happened to implement these features _on a hard drive_ first. VCRs could do everything a TiVo could do except during live TV. It's not for lack of want or idea, but the simple fact that they area sequential access medium. One might say that the 7 second tape delay used in radio statio
Re: (Score:2)
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
It was called a VCR - it's been around for years
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Again, VCRs did this for years. The intent was to rewind past the point where you hit the button, and the tape that kept going due to the spinning reel inertia.
NOTHING in that patent is new or novel. Changing from analog tape to digial media is an obvious enhancement to the VCR and should never have been granted as a patent.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot.
That's not a Tivo "feature" but an MPEG2 bug. Since MPEG2 only captures a full frame every few seconds (on low-bitrate EP mode), the Tivo can not start playing immediately. Instead it must travel backwards along the bitstream until it finds a full frame. This is what causes that slight rewind motion.
My Panasonic ReplayTV does exactly the same thing. Ditto my DVD recorder. Ditto my D-VHS tape, albeit in
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No it's not. Every other DVR I've used just stops for a moment when you hit play, and starts from that point - It's physically impossible to get the Time Warner DVR to stop when a show starts back up coming out of commercial.
The process ends up looking like this: FF->FF-> wait a few seconds, oops, it started, hit Play->Rew until you get back to the black interstitial, then Play again.
On the Tivo, when your brain registers "Okay the show's back on", you hit play, and it snaps back about 5 seconds
USPTO Patent 6,233,389 (Score:5, Informative)
It's about the TiVo Multimedia time warping system [google.com] patent.
Tomek Z. (Score:3, Funny)
It's great nobody patented car turning right yet. Imagine all those left-turn only cars...
Re:Tomek Z. (Score:4, Funny)
They call that NASCAR.
Parent
How the hell?? (Score:5, Insightful)
How in the hell can you hope to patent this?
Is this really a novel technology, or a slapping together of a bunch of existing things in a fairly obvious manner. I mean, really, the very first applications on the internet that allowed streaming video and audio supported pause, rewind, and fast forward. I distinctly remember pushing pause on things to allow the buffer to fill up over a slow dialup line. Sometimes, the slow dialup line would enforce a pause for you. ;-)
Other than the fact that it's TV, I don't see this as being any different from real player or a bunch of things which predated it.
This patent really should be vacated, I just can't see how "a buffer with forward and backward access" is actually a novel invention. I'm of the opinion that if you can show any application which streamed multimedia ever had pause etc then the whole patent is invalid.
Cheers
It was novel at the time. (Score:2, Informative)
Being able to pause a live video stream on the home TV? Then fast forward to catch up to the live stream? No one else was doing that in the late 90's.
Re: (Score:2)
If I was doing it with any form of media prior to Tivos patent, the ability to buffer and play an incomplete stream as a concept should be void.
You can't take something that someone is already doing, and add "with TV" to it, and expect that "with TV" is magically different from "with a video file on the internet".
If Tivo truly patented this before anyone demon
Re:It was novel at the time. (Score:4, Informative)
As I understand it, if Tivo used a different technique of doing on TV than was used in other media, it's patentable. If Dish used a different technique of doing it on TV than Tivo did, Dish should be okay. But if Dish just copied Tivo's patented technique, then Tivo was right to stomp them.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, but without knowing the details, unless it is more than "patent for a circular buffer with random access", then I just don't get it.
Essentially, once the concept of a buffered stream with pause, rewind, fast forwar
Re:It was novel at the time. (Score:4, Informative)
What's the technique difference?
Realplayer (before tivo): video bits get sucked off the internet (which may be digitized in real time on the other end) and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Tivo: video bits get sucked off a video digitizer and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Dish (after tivo): video bits get sucked off a video digitizer and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I fail to see how using a ring buffer to store video is worthy of a patent.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea is obvious, but .... (Score:2)
Sure, the notion of fast forward, pause, and reverse is obvious, but the methodology and working device was, at the time, non-trivial it took some work to get it good, and dish network did "steal" their technique.
Now, are all patents bogus? I tend to think so. There is too much historical account of inventors "rushing to the patent office" to beat their competitor. Now, too me, that seems terribly unfair, one will get the benefit of their research, and another will not.
On the other hand, if you spend a good
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But TiVo runs (and contributes to) Linux. And these were defensive patents. That makes them okay, right?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If the specific implementation is not novel or new, then its not valid. I highly doubt that Tivo invented a completely new non obvious method of recording MPEG video streams.
Re:Fucking patent trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, topposting because the knee-jerk patent-troll comments below are annoying.
The patent: Multimedia time warping system [google.com]
Talks about circular buffers for viewing and recording at the same time, maintaining audio synch, running the clock FWD and back while moving through the data. (borrowing from BLKMGK's comment below [slashdot.org]) Combination of software and hardware (circuit implementation) to get the function working.
NO, your VHS/Betamax player did not have this first, unless it could record the show and play it back at the same time, allowing you to watch different segments of the show while it kept recording. IIRC, Tivo was in negotiations with Echostar/Dish before Dish released a DVR. Tivo let them see a demo unit under NDA. Dish suddenly broke off talks with Tivo, and shortly after came out with their own DishDVR hardware. Sure enough, components infringing on the Tivo patent were found in the hardware.
This kind of crap is exactly what the patent system is supposed to prevent, or at least provide recourse for. The system is working correctly in this case. I'm a Dish subscriber, and love using DVR (even though DishDVR is far inferior to Tivo) because the TV service is the least expensive available where I'm at. It'll be interesting to see if prices change when this settles down.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
...and was patented by David Rafner of Honeywell, before TiVO existed .... ...or you could get a PC based PVR and pay nothing for a tivo alike with more features no restrictions and nor subscription required?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Found a link to the device I was using:
http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/pioneer/pioneer_vdr-v1000/pioneer_vdr-v1000.htm [laserdiscarchive.co.uk]
So it was half the price I remembered.
As well as being able to use both heads in playback mode you could use them in record/playback, playback/erase and erase/record.
My system started with both machines with erased disks. It then started recording on machine 1. Once the disk was full it continued recording on machine 2. Once the second disk was full it returned to machine
Re:Something, Something, Dark Side... (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple - they didn't. Read the patent http://www.google.com/patents?id=IeoIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,233,389 [google.com]
Talks about circular buffers for viewing and recording at the same time, maintaining audio synch, running the clock FWD and back while moving through the data. To say that they simply patented being able to pause TV is pretty disingenuous!
I short, summary is trolling crap per usual to get everyone up in arms. Real patent is a bit more complex. Granted much of this seems "obvious" now but back when TIVO first did it it was FAR from really obvious. It was going to get done by someone but back then on the hardware available it was pretty slick!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure when TiVo first had that feature, but I have a friend who worked as a software engineer on a Sagem DVR that had that feature back in 2000 or 2001, and they believed to be the first to do that at the time.
I don't remember the outcome of it though, I don't think it actually got released to the market.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know. If Dish did just copy Tivo's method, then Tivo is in the right.
Re: (Score:2)
Show me a VCR that can continue to record live TV and allow you to view, pause, fast forward and rewind it at the same time.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)