After a pretty quick trial, TiVo was awarded almost $74 million in its patent suit against EchoStar, the parent company of Dish Network. Now, TiVo may seek an injunction to keep EchoStar from selling DVRs. Pretty big news here in the DVR world. More details here:
Announced this morning, DirecTV has completed an agreement with TiVo to continue to provide service to combo DirecTV/TiVo DVRs for at least three years beyond the current agreement’s end date at the end of 2007. This means that DirecTV will continue to support (although not necessarily to sell) TiVo DVRs until 2010.
This isn’t too much of a surprise – DirecTV still supports UltimateTV boxes that haven’t been made for many years. But this will allay concerns that anyone should have in purchasing a TiVo over the home-grown R15 that DirecTV has released.
In any event, it’s nice to have a firm commitment in place, and some guarantee of a revenue stream for TiVo.
OK folks, this is really it. After April 15, 2006, TiVo won’t sell lifetime subscriptions for their standalone DVRs. (The only exception is the Humax DVD combo TiVo DVRs – those will still be able to get lifetime.)
It’s truly a great deal – TiVo even claims that the reason they are discontinuing it is that it provides too much value for too little money.
Here are some of the advantages of acting now:
We’re making it even better with two coupon codes through April 15, 2006:
TIVO25 will take $25 off the 90 or 190 hour TiVo DVRs
TIVO50 will take $50 off the 290 hour and larger TiVo DVRs
In my post of just minutes ago, I referenced TiVo Desktop for Macintosh (inasmuch as it isn’t compatible with Intel-based Macs). Well, I went back to get a screenshot of the page, and, amazingly, there’s no Mac version there at all now.
Does this mean a Universal Binary is forthcoming? We can only hope it means that and not the end of support for the Mac . . . I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Here’s the link – TiVo Desktop – if you want to keep checking for an update.
UPDATE: It’s back now – not sure what happened there.
This issue deserves a little note since it has an unexpected impact that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere, and that I’ve personally experienced: 7.2.2 is incompatible with certain wired ethernet adapters, and therefore, if you have one, you won’t get 7.2.2.
But there’s a glitch. If you got 7.2.2 before TiVo was aware of the issue, then you basically just lose connectivity. In my case, I signed up on the priority list, then I was out of town. So by the time my TiVo started complaining about a lack of guide data, I wasn’t here to do anything about it.
So what did I do? First I tried connecting via phone line, assuming that I would get a slight update that would fix the problem, but that wasn’t the case. So I scrounged up another, compatible adapter (one of the benefits of being in the TiVo world is having tons of extra junk around) and I’m working again.
But then I found that when I wanted to show my vacation photos from my trip, I couldn’t, because TiVo Desktop isn’t compatible with my new Intel-based MacBook Pro. Such is life on the cutting edge of technology . . .